By Manifesto Joe
I suppose it should come as no surprise, but Texas' new governor, Greg Abbott, is a politician made up of as much pond scum as his predecessor, Rick "El Pendejo" Perry. Abbott's reaction to Jade Helm 15, the military exercise planned for Texas and other parts of the Southwest, is ample evidence of that.
Abbott put out an announcement that he will have the state National Guard keep an eye on the Jade Helm exercise, an apparent response to kook right-wing Internet rumors that the purpose of the exercise is to take over Texas.
Abbott was supposed to have been a politician made up of better stuff, at least ethically, than El Pendejo. His Democratic opponent last year, former state Sen. Wendy Davis, is a politician who has been haunted by ethics questions, and remains so. Skeptical Democrats were told that Abbott, then state attorney general, was made of better stuff as a person, whether we agreed with him ideologically or not.
Tell me another one. Abbott's reaction to the right-wing mania about Jade Helm 15 appears to be a way for him to hang on to the votes of the Kook Right, yet have an escape valve to disavow them if push comes to shove among the state's "moderate" or mainstream Republicans.
One doesn't win the votes of Texas Republicans, at least not enough of them to win statewide nominations, without the support of the tea party and other Kook Right elements. Ask former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who lost races to both Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate and Dan Patrick for re-election as lieutenant governor. No sane person is going to mistake Dewhurst for a liberal. Yet that is what Cruz and Patrick, both tea party faves, painted him as. And with electoral success. Cruz is now at work enraging the Republican establishment in the Beltway, and he is running for president. Patrick is busy selling a Religious Right agenda while presiding over the Texas Senate. Dewhurst is out of office, still enjoying his multimillions.
Abbott, we were often told, was going to be different. But how is he holding the state's crazed Republican Party together? In part, by not flat-out telling the tea partiers and others on the Kook Right what raving lunatics they are -- for example, over their demented rumors about Jade Helm.
None of this should come as a surprise. When one reads the state platform of the Texas Republican Party, they advocate just about every extreme right-wing cause, perhaps stopping just short of unleashing Chiang Kai-shek's musty remains on mainland China. This is one of the craziest Republican organizations in the U.S., and that's saying plenty.
Abbott is just one more Texas Republican politician, and a typically ugly one at that. Go ahead and group him in with Cruz, Patrick, and crazed Congressman Louie Gohmert, while we're at it. He's swimming in their water, for sure.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Ted Cruz Racks One Up For The Kooks!
By Manifesto Joe
Early returns are good enough for former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz to claim victory in the Republican runoff for U.S. Senate from Texas. He leads Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst with about 55%, so just about everybody is calling this one for him.
Cruz, 41, was always the Tea Party fave in the race, and even got the endorsement of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. I don't think many liberals like rich boy Dewhurst, 66; but he's perceived as an establishment Republican, one who might actually not treat Democrats like pond scum if he had been elected. Cruz apparently has the support of all who want to lead the U.S. into some kind of civil war. He seems pretty certain to win the general election over his Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Paul Sadler. We'll see how effective he is at working across the aisle.
Personally, I don't especially mind seeing this sort of thing happen regularly, because it will take that for Republicans to realize that they've got a Frankenstein monster on their hands. It was already that way with the "Religious Right." Now, the Tea Party has given the crazies of the right wing a more secular focus, and they are getting their voters to the polls.
This will mean more high-profile politicians who favor teaching creationism in public schools, and who oppose abortion even in cases of incest and rape. This will mean more of them who favor cutting taxes for the super-rich, even when the federal deficit is in the trillions and big corporations are on record as paying no income tax at all. This will mean more of them who think all Muslims in America are terrorist sympathizers -- you know, the kind who take arsenals into movie theaters and kill a dozen people.
In other words, the differences between the right wing and everybody else will be more clearly delineated. I doubt that Cruz himself believes all of the above, but I would be willing to bet that at least one-third, and perhaps even half, of all Texans who voted for him would lean toward agreement with all of the above. This state has no shortage of ignorant lunatics.
The only impediments Cruz faces are that he has a Hispanic surname -- lots of people would deny it, but there's still a shitload of racism in this state -- and his physical appearance. If Bill Murray and Pat Buchanan could have a male child, Ted Cruz is what it would look like. That dark, goofy countenance won't help him much.
But he has strong appeal for a psychopathic element in Texas politics, and is more than likely to be our next U.S. senator. The state will soon likely rival Oklahoma (James Inhofe and Tom Coburn) for having the most certifiably insane U.S. Senate delegation in the nation.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Early returns are good enough for former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz to claim victory in the Republican runoff for U.S. Senate from Texas. He leads Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst with about 55%, so just about everybody is calling this one for him.
Cruz, 41, was always the Tea Party fave in the race, and even got the endorsement of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. I don't think many liberals like rich boy Dewhurst, 66; but he's perceived as an establishment Republican, one who might actually not treat Democrats like pond scum if he had been elected. Cruz apparently has the support of all who want to lead the U.S. into some kind of civil war. He seems pretty certain to win the general election over his Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Paul Sadler. We'll see how effective he is at working across the aisle.
Personally, I don't especially mind seeing this sort of thing happen regularly, because it will take that for Republicans to realize that they've got a Frankenstein monster on their hands. It was already that way with the "Religious Right." Now, the Tea Party has given the crazies of the right wing a more secular focus, and they are getting their voters to the polls.
This will mean more high-profile politicians who favor teaching creationism in public schools, and who oppose abortion even in cases of incest and rape. This will mean more of them who favor cutting taxes for the super-rich, even when the federal deficit is in the trillions and big corporations are on record as paying no income tax at all. This will mean more of them who think all Muslims in America are terrorist sympathizers -- you know, the kind who take arsenals into movie theaters and kill a dozen people.
In other words, the differences between the right wing and everybody else will be more clearly delineated. I doubt that Cruz himself believes all of the above, but I would be willing to bet that at least one-third, and perhaps even half, of all Texans who voted for him would lean toward agreement with all of the above. This state has no shortage of ignorant lunatics.
The only impediments Cruz faces are that he has a Hispanic surname -- lots of people would deny it, but there's still a shitload of racism in this state -- and his physical appearance. If Bill Murray and Pat Buchanan could have a male child, Ted Cruz is what it would look like. That dark, goofy countenance won't help him much.
But he has strong appeal for a psychopathic element in Texas politics, and is more than likely to be our next U.S. senator. The state will soon likely rival Oklahoma (James Inhofe and Tom Coburn) for having the most certifiably insane U.S. Senate delegation in the nation.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Fracking Could Turn Much Of America Into A Wasteland
By Manifesto Joe
They've already seen a lot of this in rural areas -- the dumping of industrial waste, the fouling of well water, the loss of bucolic hills and trees. But it's not something that just happens in sparsely populated rural areas anymore. It's come to the city.
"Fracking" -- the hydraulic fracturing technique of drilling for fossil fuels -- is now an urban phenomenon. My wife and I live in a large city, and we've got fracking wells less than half a mile from where we live, and in two different directions.
There's still much debate going on about the side effects of this technique, with the Environmental Protection Agency right in the middle. Where we live, what they're exploring for is mainly natural gas, and the gas industry denies any effect on drinking water, and any significant pollution in general.
I've noticed very strong petroleum-like odors in our neighborhood when drilling activity is hot. Also, we've got a large holding pond next to a gas field that's not too far from our house. I haven't noticed any of the neighborhood children trying to go skinny-dipping in that thing.
I suspect that the people who live next to that holding pond have seen their property values plummet, probably far more than any perks they got from selling their subsurface mineral rights. ... Which brings me to another topic.
My wife and I were among the last "holdouts" in our neighborhood. We ignored the landmen for a couple of years, and were getting all sorts of offers in the mail. There's a certain economic logic to this, because we ended up getting about twice as much for our mineral rights as did the schmucks who took the first offer they got.
I wasn't happy about the idea of having gas drilling this close to where I live, anyway. But in Texas, the way I understand the laws governing mineral rights, if you are the last SOB standing in the way of a company's extraction of fossil fuels -- well, in essence, they can just TAKE it from you. If all your neighbors have signed on -- and I know that ours did -- the company has the law on its side to just run right over you.
So, after a long holdout, we signed a lease. Now I almost wish I hadn't done it, since some unpleasant facts about the side effects of "fracking" are coming out.
I don't know very much about the technical end of this, but some areas of America are seeing some very ugly sides of the "fracking" bonanza. Truthout has been doing a lot of good reporting on the subject. Here's a link to one of their most recent posts on this.
A few years into the boom, we're finally seeing city councils and neighborhood associations getting concerned and involved, but in many ways it's far too late. The Trojan Horse, so to speak, is already in the city. I can't understand where a lot of these whiners were when the gas company landmen were tossing all that money around.
There have been serious, lethal explosions result from gas drilling. We're having earthquakes happen all over Texas now, in places that never had them before. People are reporting well water that they can set on fire with a lit match. But to hear the companies tell it, this is all nonsense.
You see, it's common knowledge that rural Texas is rife with rabble-rousing Marxists who live to destroy the lush fruits of unbridled capitalism. They are all making this stuff up, just because they hate to see anybody making a profit.
Well, it's not just in the country anymore. City slickers have gas wells nearby, too. I look at a couple of sites every time I drive to work.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
They've already seen a lot of this in rural areas -- the dumping of industrial waste, the fouling of well water, the loss of bucolic hills and trees. But it's not something that just happens in sparsely populated rural areas anymore. It's come to the city.
"Fracking" -- the hydraulic fracturing technique of drilling for fossil fuels -- is now an urban phenomenon. My wife and I live in a large city, and we've got fracking wells less than half a mile from where we live, and in two different directions.
There's still much debate going on about the side effects of this technique, with the Environmental Protection Agency right in the middle. Where we live, what they're exploring for is mainly natural gas, and the gas industry denies any effect on drinking water, and any significant pollution in general.
I've noticed very strong petroleum-like odors in our neighborhood when drilling activity is hot. Also, we've got a large holding pond next to a gas field that's not too far from our house. I haven't noticed any of the neighborhood children trying to go skinny-dipping in that thing.
I suspect that the people who live next to that holding pond have seen their property values plummet, probably far more than any perks they got from selling their subsurface mineral rights. ... Which brings me to another topic.
My wife and I were among the last "holdouts" in our neighborhood. We ignored the landmen for a couple of years, and were getting all sorts of offers in the mail. There's a certain economic logic to this, because we ended up getting about twice as much for our mineral rights as did the schmucks who took the first offer they got.
I wasn't happy about the idea of having gas drilling this close to where I live, anyway. But in Texas, the way I understand the laws governing mineral rights, if you are the last SOB standing in the way of a company's extraction of fossil fuels -- well, in essence, they can just TAKE it from you. If all your neighbors have signed on -- and I know that ours did -- the company has the law on its side to just run right over you.
So, after a long holdout, we signed a lease. Now I almost wish I hadn't done it, since some unpleasant facts about the side effects of "fracking" are coming out.
I don't know very much about the technical end of this, but some areas of America are seeing some very ugly sides of the "fracking" bonanza. Truthout has been doing a lot of good reporting on the subject. Here's a link to one of their most recent posts on this.
A few years into the boom, we're finally seeing city councils and neighborhood associations getting concerned and involved, but in many ways it's far too late. The Trojan Horse, so to speak, is already in the city. I can't understand where a lot of these whiners were when the gas company landmen were tossing all that money around.
There have been serious, lethal explosions result from gas drilling. We're having earthquakes happen all over Texas now, in places that never had them before. People are reporting well water that they can set on fire with a lit match. But to hear the companies tell it, this is all nonsense.
You see, it's common knowledge that rural Texas is rife with rabble-rousing Marxists who live to destroy the lush fruits of unbridled capitalism. They are all making this stuff up, just because they hate to see anybody making a profit.
Well, it's not just in the country anymore. City slickers have gas wells nearby, too. I look at a couple of sites every time I drive to work.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Rick Perry 'Rearmed, Reloaded' -- Let's Not Forget Retarded
By Manifesto Joe
Forgive me for not resisting the urge to get a few more boot kicks in on a fool who got up on the national stage and made Texans look like buffoons in the bargain. Not that we already didn't look like that to a great extent -- but El Pendejo made it a lot worse.
The reason for my compulsion is that he's back home, and now we have to put up with his moronic ass as governor for nearly three more years.
He's not even ruling out getting his ass kicked again on the national stage. Here's a link to that story. After Reagan and Bush 43, I hadn't thought it was possible for anyone to be too stupid to be the Republican presidential nominee. El Pendejo, and Michele Bachmann as well, seem to have found where the bottom was.
He's back in Austin, ready to do battle in state politics yet again. Isn't it enough of an embarrassment that this dorkus malorkus is now our state's longest-serving governor?
He's not exactly coming back to paradise. A lot of us back here did nothing short of marvel at his talk of the Texas Miracle, and such. Things may be miraculous where he lives, with rent at $9,900 a month. Most of us are trying to figure out how we're going to pay for our next car repair.
El Pendejo did a lot of talking about job creation in Texas, and depicted the state as a capitalist paradise. I suppose that if you're an affluent capitalist, you can carve a certain paradise out of this. You don't have to drive on the rubble that passes for streets, or hear gunshots in your neighborhood, or live next door to people who rely on food stamps to eat and can't afford medical insurance for their children.
Perry represents the class of people who have basically told corporations coast-to-coast that the Texas workforce is a great big whore with legs spread wide. As blogger Robert Ruiz of San Antonio put it in a column:
Essentially our politicians are pimping us out to the lowest bidder. In 2010 Texas tied Mississippi for having more workers earning minimum wage or less than any other state in the country. Some 9.5% of Texas workers earned minimum wage or less compared to a national average of 6%.
Here's a link to a post by Ruiz, who also has much to say about poverty nationally.
People like El Pendejo seem to do an awful lot of talking about "freedom." For the kinds of people he and his spouse have over to dinner, that means the "freedom" of the 1% to fuck over all the rest of us.
But, they have an appalling number of wage-earning slobs fooled. Once, when I was reluctantly in a Wal-Mart, waiting to be checked out, my wife and I were talking to someone, and our checker managed to hear that I work as an editor for an MSM outlet.
I heard him say, "Oh, you mean those biased liberals who suppress dissenting opinions ...?"
I decided that, under the circumstances, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to remark snidely about the general political acumen of Wal-Mart associates. I did mention to him, passing through, that I figured he was probably underpaid. "I can always go somewhere else," was his reply.
My first thought was, why the fuck don't you do just that? What I recall saying was something like, "Yeah, and be a wage slave for somebody else." Yep, he's free alright -- to be a slave who can "choose" masters.
That is a popular opinion in Texas, and seems to be why politicians like El Pendejo just keep getting elected. The people getting screwed seem to want it deeper. For the next three years, they're likely to get it.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Forgive me for not resisting the urge to get a few more boot kicks in on a fool who got up on the national stage and made Texans look like buffoons in the bargain. Not that we already didn't look like that to a great extent -- but El Pendejo made it a lot worse.
The reason for my compulsion is that he's back home, and now we have to put up with his moronic ass as governor for nearly three more years.
He's not even ruling out getting his ass kicked again on the national stage. Here's a link to that story. After Reagan and Bush 43, I hadn't thought it was possible for anyone to be too stupid to be the Republican presidential nominee. El Pendejo, and Michele Bachmann as well, seem to have found where the bottom was.
He's back in Austin, ready to do battle in state politics yet again. Isn't it enough of an embarrassment that this dorkus malorkus is now our state's longest-serving governor?
He's not exactly coming back to paradise. A lot of us back here did nothing short of marvel at his talk of the Texas Miracle, and such. Things may be miraculous where he lives, with rent at $9,900 a month. Most of us are trying to figure out how we're going to pay for our next car repair.
El Pendejo did a lot of talking about job creation in Texas, and depicted the state as a capitalist paradise. I suppose that if you're an affluent capitalist, you can carve a certain paradise out of this. You don't have to drive on the rubble that passes for streets, or hear gunshots in your neighborhood, or live next door to people who rely on food stamps to eat and can't afford medical insurance for their children.
Perry represents the class of people who have basically told corporations coast-to-coast that the Texas workforce is a great big whore with legs spread wide. As blogger Robert Ruiz of San Antonio put it in a column:
Essentially our politicians are pimping us out to the lowest bidder. In 2010 Texas tied Mississippi for having more workers earning minimum wage or less than any other state in the country. Some 9.5% of Texas workers earned minimum wage or less compared to a national average of 6%.
Here's a link to a post by Ruiz, who also has much to say about poverty nationally.
People like El Pendejo seem to do an awful lot of talking about "freedom." For the kinds of people he and his spouse have over to dinner, that means the "freedom" of the 1% to fuck over all the rest of us.
But, they have an appalling number of wage-earning slobs fooled. Once, when I was reluctantly in a Wal-Mart, waiting to be checked out, my wife and I were talking to someone, and our checker managed to hear that I work as an editor for an MSM outlet.
I heard him say, "Oh, you mean those biased liberals who suppress dissenting opinions ...?"
I decided that, under the circumstances, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to remark snidely about the general political acumen of Wal-Mart associates. I did mention to him, passing through, that I figured he was probably underpaid. "I can always go somewhere else," was his reply.
My first thought was, why the fuck don't you do just that? What I recall saying was something like, "Yeah, and be a wage slave for somebody else." Yep, he's free alright -- to be a slave who can "choose" masters.
That is a popular opinion in Texas, and seems to be why politicians like El Pendejo just keep getting elected. The people getting screwed seem to want it deeper. For the next three years, they're likely to get it.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Another Texas Two-Step: Governor Goodhair Declares, Michael Burgess Scares
By Manifesto Joe
As of this writing, Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry still hadn't given the South Carolina speech that is said to be the one that will make his bid for the presidency official. I'm presuming that he will do just that.
Goodhair keeps indicating that he wants to go national with The Texas Way. That's great -- if you're already rich. Texas has a pretty decent Third World economy. I would advise y'all in the rest of the U.S. to try to stick with the First World formula. The Third World path has definite limitations.
Sure, there have been plenty of jobs created in Texas during the nearly 11 years Goodhair has been governor -- low-wage, service-sector jobs, mostly. The state has become a veritable magnet for illegal immigrant labor. It's been estimated that if you got rid of all the workers who are here illegally, about a third of the restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area would have to close. Seems like everybody in the Anglo culture here has a few anecdotes about things like, approaching somebody in a restaurant or supermarket only to be told, "No habla Ingles."
(Fortunately, "Donde esta el bano?" was a common tourista question I remembered from Spanish class.)
Creation of such crummy jobs is about all Texas can point to for recent bragging rights. During Goodhair's time in office (he's the state's longest-serving governor, unfortunately), basics such as education, health care, per capita income and infrastructure of all kinds have suffered. The state ranks relatively low in any rankings of such sectors. ("Thank God for Mississippi!" one school official is reported to have said.)
Our public universities, led by the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems, are BIG, like everything in Texas. They are also notoriously mediocre. Even New York City's public college system, designed mainly for disadvantaged students, is considered at least marginally better than what the state government supports here.
Goodhair should know about academic mediocrity -- he's a graduate of A&M's College Station flagship, and he even did some time on academic probation while he was there.
Then there's his beef with the federal government. He has hinted strongly at secession, yet he whines when he doesn't immediately get federal money, like when wildfires burned up a lot of ranches and rural subdivisions.
Among other things, the state's debt has approximately doubled in a decade, and the $25 billion shortfall that the Legislature "dealt with" during this biennial session was by far the largest in Texas history.
Hey, but we still have no state income tax! Instead, we have very high sales taxes and user fees. And the property taxes can be pretty steep, thanks to all those medical bills the taxpayers have to cover so that our charity hospitals and clinics can treat the millions of uninsured people.
Don't get the idea that I hate Texas -- hell, I'm a native South Texan, and there is much in this culture that I know I would miss if I relocated to some politically sane place like Vermont. I have my own recipe for the best chili con carne in the world, and there's nothing like a big platter of sizzling fajitas, prepared by someone who really knows how. Shiner Bock gets my vote as one of the best beers around, and the wines of West Texas are getting better all the time. I'm indifferent to the Dallas Cowboys, but I have to admit to feeling a little pride when the Texas Rangers made it to the World Series for the first time in franchise history last fall.
But we ought to face it -- Texas is a good place mainly for those lucky enough to be born rich. If you live in a gated community and can afford to send your kids to private schools and colleges, you don't notice it much when a lot of the basics begin to fall apart. Well, maybe when you fail to miss a big pothole in the road while driving that swell new Lexus to the country club, one notices then.
Rick Perry thinks Texas should be a model for the rest of the nation. Il Doofus -- not coincidentally Perry's predecessor as governor -- just about halfway took the U.S. to that very place during eight years in office. If the American people are stupid enough to want someone to really finish the job, then Goodhair's their man. He's been one of the lousiest governors we ever had, and it would be fitting for him to be the Republicans' successor to Il Doofus, who in Texas started the job that Perry has pretty well finished here.
I just hope the rest of the country is wise enough not to do what Texans have done.
Step Two: Burgess wants to impeach Obama so that the latter's agenda can be stopped
Yep, that's what U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville (Dallas area), told a Tea Party gathering in Keller, Texas, a few days ago. I don't remember him elaborating as to exactly what the charges would be, but he did say that it would be a great way to save the republic, or something like that, by bringing President Obama's agenda to a grinding halt.
Reporters tried to get Burgess to follow up on this. At first he responded awkwardly, then his office suddenly stopped taking any phone calls on the subject. He's been silent ever since.
Here's a link to a UPI report on the subject.
You may recall that Burgess was one of the "lawmakers" in Congress who wanted to block government regulation that would require light bulbs to be more energy-efficient. Here's a link to my post on that.
The voters in Texas sure know how to pick 'em.
A stock response from Republicans would be to point out that there were Democrats who wanted to bring articles of impeachment against Il Doofus. I honestly wish that could have happened. In that case, during the 2002-03 run-up to the Iraq invasion, we had a president who was pretty clearly lying to us about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He got the U.S. into a war that, so far, has cost nearly $800 billion and nearly 1.5 million Iraqi lives. War crimes charges on the international scale might have been good, too.
Unfortunately, Il Doofus didn't leave quite enough evidence to bring impeachment charges. As always, he left open the possibility that he was merely ignorant and foolish.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
As of this writing, Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry still hadn't given the South Carolina speech that is said to be the one that will make his bid for the presidency official. I'm presuming that he will do just that.
Goodhair keeps indicating that he wants to go national with The Texas Way. That's great -- if you're already rich. Texas has a pretty decent Third World economy. I would advise y'all in the rest of the U.S. to try to stick with the First World formula. The Third World path has definite limitations.
Sure, there have been plenty of jobs created in Texas during the nearly 11 years Goodhair has been governor -- low-wage, service-sector jobs, mostly. The state has become a veritable magnet for illegal immigrant labor. It's been estimated that if you got rid of all the workers who are here illegally, about a third of the restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area would have to close. Seems like everybody in the Anglo culture here has a few anecdotes about things like, approaching somebody in a restaurant or supermarket only to be told, "No habla Ingles."
(Fortunately, "Donde esta el bano?" was a common tourista question I remembered from Spanish class.)
Creation of such crummy jobs is about all Texas can point to for recent bragging rights. During Goodhair's time in office (he's the state's longest-serving governor, unfortunately), basics such as education, health care, per capita income and infrastructure of all kinds have suffered. The state ranks relatively low in any rankings of such sectors. ("Thank God for Mississippi!" one school official is reported to have said.)
Our public universities, led by the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems, are BIG, like everything in Texas. They are also notoriously mediocre. Even New York City's public college system, designed mainly for disadvantaged students, is considered at least marginally better than what the state government supports here.
Goodhair should know about academic mediocrity -- he's a graduate of A&M's College Station flagship, and he even did some time on academic probation while he was there.
Then there's his beef with the federal government. He has hinted strongly at secession, yet he whines when he doesn't immediately get federal money, like when wildfires burned up a lot of ranches and rural subdivisions.
Among other things, the state's debt has approximately doubled in a decade, and the $25 billion shortfall that the Legislature "dealt with" during this biennial session was by far the largest in Texas history.
Hey, but we still have no state income tax! Instead, we have very high sales taxes and user fees. And the property taxes can be pretty steep, thanks to all those medical bills the taxpayers have to cover so that our charity hospitals and clinics can treat the millions of uninsured people.
Don't get the idea that I hate Texas -- hell, I'm a native South Texan, and there is much in this culture that I know I would miss if I relocated to some politically sane place like Vermont. I have my own recipe for the best chili con carne in the world, and there's nothing like a big platter of sizzling fajitas, prepared by someone who really knows how. Shiner Bock gets my vote as one of the best beers around, and the wines of West Texas are getting better all the time. I'm indifferent to the Dallas Cowboys, but I have to admit to feeling a little pride when the Texas Rangers made it to the World Series for the first time in franchise history last fall.
But we ought to face it -- Texas is a good place mainly for those lucky enough to be born rich. If you live in a gated community and can afford to send your kids to private schools and colleges, you don't notice it much when a lot of the basics begin to fall apart. Well, maybe when you fail to miss a big pothole in the road while driving that swell new Lexus to the country club, one notices then.
Rick Perry thinks Texas should be a model for the rest of the nation. Il Doofus -- not coincidentally Perry's predecessor as governor -- just about halfway took the U.S. to that very place during eight years in office. If the American people are stupid enough to want someone to really finish the job, then Goodhair's their man. He's been one of the lousiest governors we ever had, and it would be fitting for him to be the Republicans' successor to Il Doofus, who in Texas started the job that Perry has pretty well finished here.
I just hope the rest of the country is wise enough not to do what Texans have done.
Step Two: Burgess wants to impeach Obama so that the latter's agenda can be stopped
Yep, that's what U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville (Dallas area), told a Tea Party gathering in Keller, Texas, a few days ago. I don't remember him elaborating as to exactly what the charges would be, but he did say that it would be a great way to save the republic, or something like that, by bringing President Obama's agenda to a grinding halt.
Reporters tried to get Burgess to follow up on this. At first he responded awkwardly, then his office suddenly stopped taking any phone calls on the subject. He's been silent ever since.
Here's a link to a UPI report on the subject.
You may recall that Burgess was one of the "lawmakers" in Congress who wanted to block government regulation that would require light bulbs to be more energy-efficient. Here's a link to my post on that.
The voters in Texas sure know how to pick 'em.
A stock response from Republicans would be to point out that there were Democrats who wanted to bring articles of impeachment against Il Doofus. I honestly wish that could have happened. In that case, during the 2002-03 run-up to the Iraq invasion, we had a president who was pretty clearly lying to us about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He got the U.S. into a war that, so far, has cost nearly $800 billion and nearly 1.5 million Iraqi lives. War crimes charges on the international scale might have been good, too.
Unfortunately, Il Doofus didn't leave quite enough evidence to bring impeachment charges. As always, he left open the possibility that he was merely ignorant and foolish.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Texas Two-Step: How Many Republicans Does It Take To Screw Up A Light Bulb?
By Manifesto Joe
As budget-deficit and debt-limit talks between the president and the Congress are stalemated, and the future of little things like Social Security and Medicare may be hanging in the balance, isn't it comforting to know that lawmakers like Joe Barton of Arlington, Texas, are in there fighting for the rights of Americans to buy cheap-ass light bulbs?
Barton, a veteran Republican House member, already had the dubious distinction of being the member of Congress who most strikingly resembles a victim of Down's syndrome. His "valiant" battle for the cheap incandescent light bulb didn't do much for his image. Here's what The Christian Science Monitor had on this issue Tuesday.
But wait -- the issue isn't burned out yet. After Barton failed to get a supermajority for his bill in the House, Michael Burgess came to the rescue. Politico.com reported that:
Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) on Wednesday filed an amendment to the Energy and Water spending bill that would prohibit the Energy Department from requiring traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.
Here's a link to the entire article.
Seems that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, Retarded-Minn., has climbed aboard this issue as well. It's supposed to be unbelievable government intrusion into people's lives. How dare the government try to tell people that they shouldn't waste electricity!
Step Two: Texas State Board of Education needs more conservative Christians?
That's according to Barbara Cargill, a Republican from The Woodlands (Houston area), the new chairperson of the state board. Cargill has drawn criticism for a speech she made to a friendly audience, saying:
"Right now there are six true conservative Christians on the board, so we have to fight for two votes. In previous years, we had to fight for one vote to get a majority."
Here's a link to the entire article.
This affronted some other members of the 15-member board, who consider themselves Christians but don't seem to want to force "intelligent design" materials into public school biology classes. Ms. Cargill doesn't consider them, even the Republicans among them, to be reliable votes.
Since we're on the subject of "intelligent design," don't look to the Texas Legislature or any other entities of this state's government for evidence of that. Thanks to public policies toward education, schoolchildren will begin this school year in August without new textbooks. Yep, that's right. Here's a link to a story on the subject.
But hell, who needs them thar books? It's the humanity in the classroom that matters, right?
(That was often what seemed like the very problem to me.)
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
As budget-deficit and debt-limit talks between the president and the Congress are stalemated, and the future of little things like Social Security and Medicare may be hanging in the balance, isn't it comforting to know that lawmakers like Joe Barton of Arlington, Texas, are in there fighting for the rights of Americans to buy cheap-ass light bulbs?
Barton, a veteran Republican House member, already had the dubious distinction of being the member of Congress who most strikingly resembles a victim of Down's syndrome. His "valiant" battle for the cheap incandescent light bulb didn't do much for his image. Here's what The Christian Science Monitor had on this issue Tuesday.
But wait -- the issue isn't burned out yet. After Barton failed to get a supermajority for his bill in the House, Michael Burgess came to the rescue. Politico.com reported that:
Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) on Wednesday filed an amendment to the Energy and Water spending bill that would prohibit the Energy Department from requiring traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.
Here's a link to the entire article.
Seems that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, Retarded-Minn., has climbed aboard this issue as well. It's supposed to be unbelievable government intrusion into people's lives. How dare the government try to tell people that they shouldn't waste electricity!
Step Two: Texas State Board of Education needs more conservative Christians?
That's according to Barbara Cargill, a Republican from The Woodlands (Houston area), the new chairperson of the state board. Cargill has drawn criticism for a speech she made to a friendly audience, saying:
"Right now there are six true conservative Christians on the board, so we have to fight for two votes. In previous years, we had to fight for one vote to get a majority."
Here's a link to the entire article.
This affronted some other members of the 15-member board, who consider themselves Christians but don't seem to want to force "intelligent design" materials into public school biology classes. Ms. Cargill doesn't consider them, even the Republicans among them, to be reliable votes.
Since we're on the subject of "intelligent design," don't look to the Texas Legislature or any other entities of this state's government for evidence of that. Thanks to public policies toward education, schoolchildren will begin this school year in August without new textbooks. Yep, that's right. Here's a link to a story on the subject.
But hell, who needs them thar books? It's the humanity in the classroom that matters, right?
(That was often what seemed like the very problem to me.)
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Poll Shows Texans Want Services But Don't Want To Pay For Them
By Manifesto Joe
As the Texas Legislature nears the end of its biennial session, an enlightening new poll from The Texas Tribune has been released.
There's one thing for certain that the poll findings suggest: The lawmakers had better avoid any cuts they can in public education. Among Texas voters, there appears to be a remarkable degree of ignorance about the basics of public affairs.
In short, the poll indicates that Texans want services from their state government, but largely don't seem to want to generate new revenue to pay for them.
Here's a link to the poll's particular findings.
Tea Party foolishness on parade
This Texas Legislature is about 2-to-1 Republican, due in large part to Tea Party success in getting right-wingers to the polls last November. The new members are generally against any and all new taxes, and some of the old ones as well. Their solution to the state's record budget shortfall has always been to take a meat ax to state government.
They are not above lies and distortion to achieve this. Here's a link to a previous post of mine showing Young Republican deceit regarding spending on education.
The poll shows that voter intelligence, or lack thereof, lies behind their electoral success. Far more voters in Texas want to deal with the budget shortfall through cuts than through boosting revenue. But when presented with specific areas, such as public education, for such cuts, the poll respondents became very unclear and frequently contradicted themselves.
Texas has never been generous toward its public schools. Here's a link to a story from earlier this year. In short, about a decade ago, Texas was 25th among the 50 states in spending per pupil. It's now 37th. And now, clearly, that's going to get worse.
A frequent right-wing mantra is that you don't solve problems just by throwing money at them. But there seems to be some correlation between education spending and the quality of teaching that emerges.
Scoring No. 1 on the Report Card on American Education, released in 2010, was Vermont (incidentally, the home state of the only avowed socialist in Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders). That state was also No. 1 in percentage of state expenditures on public education, with 36.7% of its budget going there. It makes a difference in quality of teachers, availability of technology and equipment, and in class size, among other factors.
Although one obviously doesn't want to pay needlessly for things, quite often what you get is what you're willing to pay for.
Cutting spending on public education in Texas? This new poll demonstrates that we already have a problem here, as so many likely voters seem to believe that 2 plus 2 can be made to equal 5. For God's sake, we don't need to slash public education -- we clearly already have a deficit in that area!
So, who, then, will pay the new taxes? How about those who have the ability to pay? This state already has one of the most regressive tax structures in America. My wife and I have a very ordinary family income, and yet we pay thousands a year in sales taxes and user fees. How about making some of the big shots, like Irving, Texas-based ExxonMobil, pay up?
Where will the corporate scofflaws go?
Another right-wing mantra is that if taxes start going up sharply on big business, they will pull up stakes and head for someplace more hospitable.
And where would that be? Canada? They actually tax their corporations up there. The rates are rather low, but they don't exempt two-thirds of them from paying. Seems that Canadians have figured out that if you want services, you have to pay for them.
Mexico? Would corporate executives want to send their kids to those schools, drive on those roads, and hope that none of their relatives got beheaded by drug-cartel gangsters?
Venezuela? I'm sure that Hugo Chavez would just love for ExxonMobil to relocate its executive suites to Caracas!
What we're witnessing is ignorance on a mass scale, and it goes well beyond Texas' borders. Last night, I got a comment on a post that's a few months old, from a man who has an Internet Tea Party radio show. This was the final paragraph:
Oh and unlike you, I have the balls to post under my own name. Perhaps that comes from knowing that my ideas are corrects and your ideas are nothing more than BS you picked up on MSNBC or from the New York Times. Oh how easily the stupid and naive or fooled by the mainstream media.
This semiliterate man has a radio show? Oh well, I suppose one doesn't have to be able to write and spell coherent English sentences while doing a broadcast. It still gives one pause, though.
It's been said that if you think education is expensive, wait until you see how much ignorance costs. I think that the wait is over.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
As the Texas Legislature nears the end of its biennial session, an enlightening new poll from The Texas Tribune has been released.
There's one thing for certain that the poll findings suggest: The lawmakers had better avoid any cuts they can in public education. Among Texas voters, there appears to be a remarkable degree of ignorance about the basics of public affairs.
In short, the poll indicates that Texans want services from their state government, but largely don't seem to want to generate new revenue to pay for them.
Here's a link to the poll's particular findings.
Tea Party foolishness on parade
This Texas Legislature is about 2-to-1 Republican, due in large part to Tea Party success in getting right-wingers to the polls last November. The new members are generally against any and all new taxes, and some of the old ones as well. Their solution to the state's record budget shortfall has always been to take a meat ax to state government.
They are not above lies and distortion to achieve this. Here's a link to a previous post of mine showing Young Republican deceit regarding spending on education.
The poll shows that voter intelligence, or lack thereof, lies behind their electoral success. Far more voters in Texas want to deal with the budget shortfall through cuts than through boosting revenue. But when presented with specific areas, such as public education, for such cuts, the poll respondents became very unclear and frequently contradicted themselves.
Texas has never been generous toward its public schools. Here's a link to a story from earlier this year. In short, about a decade ago, Texas was 25th among the 50 states in spending per pupil. It's now 37th. And now, clearly, that's going to get worse.
A frequent right-wing mantra is that you don't solve problems just by throwing money at them. But there seems to be some correlation between education spending and the quality of teaching that emerges.
Scoring No. 1 on the Report Card on American Education, released in 2010, was Vermont (incidentally, the home state of the only avowed socialist in Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders). That state was also No. 1 in percentage of state expenditures on public education, with 36.7% of its budget going there. It makes a difference in quality of teachers, availability of technology and equipment, and in class size, among other factors.
Although one obviously doesn't want to pay needlessly for things, quite often what you get is what you're willing to pay for.
Cutting spending on public education in Texas? This new poll demonstrates that we already have a problem here, as so many likely voters seem to believe that 2 plus 2 can be made to equal 5. For God's sake, we don't need to slash public education -- we clearly already have a deficit in that area!
So, who, then, will pay the new taxes? How about those who have the ability to pay? This state already has one of the most regressive tax structures in America. My wife and I have a very ordinary family income, and yet we pay thousands a year in sales taxes and user fees. How about making some of the big shots, like Irving, Texas-based ExxonMobil, pay up?
Where will the corporate scofflaws go?
Another right-wing mantra is that if taxes start going up sharply on big business, they will pull up stakes and head for someplace more hospitable.
And where would that be? Canada? They actually tax their corporations up there. The rates are rather low, but they don't exempt two-thirds of them from paying. Seems that Canadians have figured out that if you want services, you have to pay for them.
Mexico? Would corporate executives want to send their kids to those schools, drive on those roads, and hope that none of their relatives got beheaded by drug-cartel gangsters?
Venezuela? I'm sure that Hugo Chavez would just love for ExxonMobil to relocate its executive suites to Caracas!
What we're witnessing is ignorance on a mass scale, and it goes well beyond Texas' borders. Last night, I got a comment on a post that's a few months old, from a man who has an Internet Tea Party radio show. This was the final paragraph:
Oh and unlike you, I have the balls to post under my own name. Perhaps that comes from knowing that my ideas are corrects and your ideas are nothing more than BS you picked up on MSNBC or from the New York Times. Oh how easily the stupid and naive or fooled by the mainstream media.
This semiliterate man has a radio show? Oh well, I suppose one doesn't have to be able to write and spell coherent English sentences while doing a broadcast. It still gives one pause, though.
It's been said that if you think education is expensive, wait until you see how much ignorance costs. I think that the wait is over.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Texas Republican Crybabies Will Pout While Obama Visits
By Manifesto Joe
This is the state whose governor talked in thinly veiled terms, in 2009, about secession. It's probably at a risk to life and limb that President Barack Obama will come here at all.
He's coming Tuesday to El Paso and Austin, two places where he has actually had good voter support -- but the Republicans will be pouting and reviling him.
It seems that his administration didn't approve federal emergency funds after wildfires burned up a lot of acreage, and more than a few posh vacation homes, in the state. Some ranchers are going to lose money, too, because of the destruction.
It's been bad here, but Obama has had a lot on his plate lately. I'd say, given the devastation and loss of life seen in places like Alabama, that the FEMA money is probably being better spent there. (By the way, I've never heard of Alabama being an especially pro-Obama stronghold, either.)
But Texas Republicans seem to think that Obama has a political vendetta against the state, and that he's taking it out on Texas now, amid scorched earth.
Bear in mind, it's not like he's going to be losing a lot of votes over all this. He wasn't getting Republican votes in Texas anyway, ever, so what's there for him to lose, politically?
Here's a McClatchy newspapers piece on the subject, at this link.
When you've got a brat governor who's talking secession, is it a surprise that Texas isn't high on the federal priority list? But I doubt that this is even the reason for the denial. The federal government is dealing with an enormous deficit right now, and decisions have to be made. With all the untaxed money there is here in this state, I suspect that Texas has plenty of money to deal with this situation, without the help of the federal government at this particular time.
Get over it, Republican crybabies.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
This is the state whose governor talked in thinly veiled terms, in 2009, about secession. It's probably at a risk to life and limb that President Barack Obama will come here at all.
He's coming Tuesday to El Paso and Austin, two places where he has actually had good voter support -- but the Republicans will be pouting and reviling him.
It seems that his administration didn't approve federal emergency funds after wildfires burned up a lot of acreage, and more than a few posh vacation homes, in the state. Some ranchers are going to lose money, too, because of the destruction.
It's been bad here, but Obama has had a lot on his plate lately. I'd say, given the devastation and loss of life seen in places like Alabama, that the FEMA money is probably being better spent there. (By the way, I've never heard of Alabama being an especially pro-Obama stronghold, either.)
But Texas Republicans seem to think that Obama has a political vendetta against the state, and that he's taking it out on Texas now, amid scorched earth.
Bear in mind, it's not like he's going to be losing a lot of votes over all this. He wasn't getting Republican votes in Texas anyway, ever, so what's there for him to lose, politically?
Here's a McClatchy newspapers piece on the subject, at this link.
When you've got a brat governor who's talking secession, is it a surprise that Texas isn't high on the federal priority list? But I doubt that this is even the reason for the denial. The federal government is dealing with an enormous deficit right now, and decisions have to be made. With all the untaxed money there is here in this state, I suspect that Texas has plenty of money to deal with this situation, without the help of the federal government at this particular time.
Get over it, Republican crybabies.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, March 15, 2010
History Is Written By The Winners: Texas Schoolbook Flap Nothing New
By Manifesto Joe
The old story goes like this: In Texas in the late 1940s, two Hispanic men walk into a restaurant and sit, waiting to order. The wait person comes up and tells them, "We don't serve Mexicans."
One of the men replies, "I don't want to eat a Mexican."
Thankfully, it's been illegal since 1964 for Texas restaurants to exclude Hispanics. Not so, however, with our state's public-school textbooks.
On Friday, the State Board of Education, now dominated by "conservatives," voted 10-5 to preliminarily adopt a social studies curriculum that, according to the dissenting minority, fails to recognize the achievements of minorities in Texas history.
Among other things, the board rejected a proposal to have the books mention that Hispanics were among the fallen heroes of the famous 1836 siege of the Alamo. That doesn't seem like much to ask -- I recall that Seguin, a town in the South Texas region where I'm from, is named after Juan Seguin, one of the great Hispanic heroes of the Texas Revolution. There were others besides him, and the men at the Alamo.
Things got a little ugly the day before. One of the minority members of the board, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, walked out of the session Thursday, accusing her fellow board members of "whitewashing" the social studies standards.
"I'm leaving," Berlanga told The Associated Press. "We can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist."
One place I'm not going to go is -- how Texas became part of the U.S. It's often been characterized as an outright theft from Mexico. Judging from what all I've read, it was a multifaceted, messy clash between two cultures that would have produced grievances had it gone either way.
The point is, one of the basic facts pushed by the minority board members is that there were quite notably Hispanics among those who rebelled against the dictatorship of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Refusing to recognize them does indeed seem like a cheesy, Anglocentric whitewash.
When I think of all the cities, towns, rivers and such here with Hispanic names -- San Antonio, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Amarillo, San Angelo, Agua Dulce, Port Lavaca, Gonzales, Del Rio, Palacios, Padre Island, the Rio Grande, the Brazos River, etc., it leaves no doubt as to the huge imprint that Hispanic culture has had here. Our indigenous cuisine, known as Tex-Mex, is a blend of food from two cultures. Yet, the whitewash continues. The "English only" movement is alive and well, and there remain many "Minutemen" chapters who have immigrants with Hispanic surnames in the crosshairs.
But, sadly, this is nothing really new. "History" by omission has left gaps in Texas schoolbooks for generations.
In high school, my best subject was history. I won two academic awards, and placed out of 6 college hours of U.S. history by taking a CLEP test. Yet, I've learned more history in some ways through independent adult reading than I ever did in school. To wit:
-- The U.S. basically picked a needless fight with Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, and seized the European country's colonies. A "pacification" of the indigenous population followed in the Philippines, one which, during the first years of the 20th century, led to the deaths of about 1 million Filipinos. The Turkish slaughter of Armenians about a decade later is often referred to as the first great genocide of the 20th century. Wrong -- that describes what the U.S. did to the Philippines years before. None other than Mark Twain was a leader of the opposition to the "pacification." "Thirty thousand killed a million," referring to the size of the U.S. military force and their victims, was a slogan of the opposition.
-- Now we get into an area long known to CIA insiders as "blowback." The former Spanish colony of Cuba became an American puppet state for decades. The U.S. turned the island into a big plantation/casino/whorehouse, at the expense of the indigenous population, and then acted shocked, shocked, when communist rebels overthrew the Batista regime and remain in control 51 years later. Hey, how did that happen?
-- The U.S. had a long history in Nicaragua before the modern Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. The Somoza family led a succession of puppet governments for decades after American soldiers chased Sandino and his rebels around the Central American countryside. Our Marines were down there so many times, they should have just renamed the place Camp LeJeune South.
-- In Iran, the CIA, with a contingent led by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, overthrew a legitimate nationalist government in 1953 and set the Shah back up in power. In 1979, the situation blew up in "our" faces, and a militant anti-American government has been in power there ever since. Hey, how did that happen, too?
I could go on, but that would make this post too long. Suffice it to say that "official" history has always been written by the "winners," or at least the majority. The real stories are often only available from unofficial sources. Those who have somehow managed to learn better, well -- they shouldn't be the least bit surprised that it's still going on.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
The old story goes like this: In Texas in the late 1940s, two Hispanic men walk into a restaurant and sit, waiting to order. The wait person comes up and tells them, "We don't serve Mexicans."
One of the men replies, "I don't want to eat a Mexican."
Thankfully, it's been illegal since 1964 for Texas restaurants to exclude Hispanics. Not so, however, with our state's public-school textbooks.
On Friday, the State Board of Education, now dominated by "conservatives," voted 10-5 to preliminarily adopt a social studies curriculum that, according to the dissenting minority, fails to recognize the achievements of minorities in Texas history.
Among other things, the board rejected a proposal to have the books mention that Hispanics were among the fallen heroes of the famous 1836 siege of the Alamo. That doesn't seem like much to ask -- I recall that Seguin, a town in the South Texas region where I'm from, is named after Juan Seguin, one of the great Hispanic heroes of the Texas Revolution. There were others besides him, and the men at the Alamo.
Things got a little ugly the day before. One of the minority members of the board, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, walked out of the session Thursday, accusing her fellow board members of "whitewashing" the social studies standards.
"I'm leaving," Berlanga told The Associated Press. "We can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist."
One place I'm not going to go is -- how Texas became part of the U.S. It's often been characterized as an outright theft from Mexico. Judging from what all I've read, it was a multifaceted, messy clash between two cultures that would have produced grievances had it gone either way.
The point is, one of the basic facts pushed by the minority board members is that there were quite notably Hispanics among those who rebelled against the dictatorship of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Refusing to recognize them does indeed seem like a cheesy, Anglocentric whitewash.
When I think of all the cities, towns, rivers and such here with Hispanic names -- San Antonio, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Amarillo, San Angelo, Agua Dulce, Port Lavaca, Gonzales, Del Rio, Palacios, Padre Island, the Rio Grande, the Brazos River, etc., it leaves no doubt as to the huge imprint that Hispanic culture has had here. Our indigenous cuisine, known as Tex-Mex, is a blend of food from two cultures. Yet, the whitewash continues. The "English only" movement is alive and well, and there remain many "Minutemen" chapters who have immigrants with Hispanic surnames in the crosshairs.
But, sadly, this is nothing really new. "History" by omission has left gaps in Texas schoolbooks for generations.
In high school, my best subject was history. I won two academic awards, and placed out of 6 college hours of U.S. history by taking a CLEP test. Yet, I've learned more history in some ways through independent adult reading than I ever did in school. To wit:
-- The U.S. basically picked a needless fight with Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, and seized the European country's colonies. A "pacification" of the indigenous population followed in the Philippines, one which, during the first years of the 20th century, led to the deaths of about 1 million Filipinos. The Turkish slaughter of Armenians about a decade later is often referred to as the first great genocide of the 20th century. Wrong -- that describes what the U.S. did to the Philippines years before. None other than Mark Twain was a leader of the opposition to the "pacification." "Thirty thousand killed a million," referring to the size of the U.S. military force and their victims, was a slogan of the opposition.
-- Now we get into an area long known to CIA insiders as "blowback." The former Spanish colony of Cuba became an American puppet state for decades. The U.S. turned the island into a big plantation/casino/whorehouse, at the expense of the indigenous population, and then acted shocked, shocked, when communist rebels overthrew the Batista regime and remain in control 51 years later. Hey, how did that happen?
-- The U.S. had a long history in Nicaragua before the modern Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. The Somoza family led a succession of puppet governments for decades after American soldiers chased Sandino and his rebels around the Central American countryside. Our Marines were down there so many times, they should have just renamed the place Camp LeJeune South.
-- In Iran, the CIA, with a contingent led by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, overthrew a legitimate nationalist government in 1953 and set the Shah back up in power. In 1979, the situation blew up in "our" faces, and a militant anti-American government has been in power there ever since. Hey, how did that happen, too?
I could go on, but that would make this post too long. Suffice it to say that "official" history has always been written by the "winners," or at least the majority. The real stories are often only available from unofficial sources. Those who have somehow managed to learn better, well -- they shouldn't be the least bit surprised that it's still going on.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Mr. Greenjeans For Governor Of Texas
By Manifesto Joe
Last week, Texas' long-suffering Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted for Houston Mayor Bill White as the nominee to challenge Gov. Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry in November.
Even though White looks remarkably like Mr. Greenjeans from Captain Kangaroo, and is perhaps even less telegenic, he's believed to be the first Texas Democrat since Ann Richards to have a realistic chance at upsetting a GOP opponent for governor. But it's hard to tell that when one talks to many Anglos around here -- almost all members of my wife's large extended family are Republicans.
White has the image of a bald, bland, moderate technocrat, which should play to his advantage in a conservative state. Of course, the other side is painting him as a flaming closet liberal. That's not surprising, though I would give some Texas Republicans credit for being a shade to the left of Mussolini.
Another thing that may work in White's favor -- a surprising number of independent Texans, after more than nine years, are sick of having a laughingstock for governor. Perry had three challengers in the 2006 general election, and won with less than 40 percent of the vote. He could be vulnerable this time as well.
But Perry, for all his surface buffoonery, has something in common with fellow buffoon George W. Bush -- he somehow keeps winning. He's already Texas' longest-serving governor, and if he wins again, he'll be on his way to 14 years in office. In purely vote-getting terms, he must be doing something right. In trouncing U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and wingnut Debra Medina in last week's GOP primary, he certainly seems to have kept his base among the Republican right wing.
Here's a sample of the kind of silliness Texans can expect if they have the poor judgment to elect Perry for another four years. During the primary campaign, Governor Goodhair proposed a sort of cyber high school for those at high risk of dropping out. In other words, high school by computer for those whose family situations make it hard for them to be in class five days a week.
This is a harebrained idea straight out of Highland Park, where they must think everybody has a battery-powered laptop and a smart phone. It's certainly out of touch with the realities of the barrio, the ghetto and the colonia. It's even out of touch with the circumstances faced by many working-class Anglo kids.
For starters, America has already become largely divided into two groups: people who have personal computers, and those who don't. The latter group tends to be either very young or very old, and above all, poor. How likely is it that a minority teenager, perhaps being raised by a working single mother or a grandmother, will have easy access to a Web-connected personal computer? These days, there would be some. But the computer-less among us would include a heavy concentration of youths who are probably at the highest risk to become dropouts.
Ah, but can't they get cheap computers for teens whose families can't afford them? And wouldn't that be no more expensive than having the kid attend school in the conventional way?
OK -- now, what happens when the computer crashes? One of the big reasons yours truly is posting for the first time in over 10 days is that my computer was infected with a "rootkit." I wrestled with that for days, running anti-virus software that was ineffective. Finally, I had to pay a tidy little sum to a geek service to get my machine disinfected. In cyber high school, where is that money going to come from?
Anyway -- I don't know much about White or what he advocates for the state. I suppose we'll learn more about that in coming months. But I'm already for him. I'll take the bland technocrat over the laughingstock any day.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Last week, Texas' long-suffering Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted for Houston Mayor Bill White as the nominee to challenge Gov. Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry in November.
Even though White looks remarkably like Mr. Greenjeans from Captain Kangaroo, and is perhaps even less telegenic, he's believed to be the first Texas Democrat since Ann Richards to have a realistic chance at upsetting a GOP opponent for governor. But it's hard to tell that when one talks to many Anglos around here -- almost all members of my wife's large extended family are Republicans.
White has the image of a bald, bland, moderate technocrat, which should play to his advantage in a conservative state. Of course, the other side is painting him as a flaming closet liberal. That's not surprising, though I would give some Texas Republicans credit for being a shade to the left of Mussolini.
Another thing that may work in White's favor -- a surprising number of independent Texans, after more than nine years, are sick of having a laughingstock for governor. Perry had three challengers in the 2006 general election, and won with less than 40 percent of the vote. He could be vulnerable this time as well.
But Perry, for all his surface buffoonery, has something in common with fellow buffoon George W. Bush -- he somehow keeps winning. He's already Texas' longest-serving governor, and if he wins again, he'll be on his way to 14 years in office. In purely vote-getting terms, he must be doing something right. In trouncing U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and wingnut Debra Medina in last week's GOP primary, he certainly seems to have kept his base among the Republican right wing.
Here's a sample of the kind of silliness Texans can expect if they have the poor judgment to elect Perry for another four years. During the primary campaign, Governor Goodhair proposed a sort of cyber high school for those at high risk of dropping out. In other words, high school by computer for those whose family situations make it hard for them to be in class five days a week.
This is a harebrained idea straight out of Highland Park, where they must think everybody has a battery-powered laptop and a smart phone. It's certainly out of touch with the realities of the barrio, the ghetto and the colonia. It's even out of touch with the circumstances faced by many working-class Anglo kids.
For starters, America has already become largely divided into two groups: people who have personal computers, and those who don't. The latter group tends to be either very young or very old, and above all, poor. How likely is it that a minority teenager, perhaps being raised by a working single mother or a grandmother, will have easy access to a Web-connected personal computer? These days, there would be some. But the computer-less among us would include a heavy concentration of youths who are probably at the highest risk to become dropouts.
Ah, but can't they get cheap computers for teens whose families can't afford them? And wouldn't that be no more expensive than having the kid attend school in the conventional way?
OK -- now, what happens when the computer crashes? One of the big reasons yours truly is posting for the first time in over 10 days is that my computer was infected with a "rootkit." I wrestled with that for days, running anti-virus software that was ineffective. Finally, I had to pay a tidy little sum to a geek service to get my machine disinfected. In cyber high school, where is that money going to come from?
Anyway -- I don't know much about White or what he advocates for the state. I suppose we'll learn more about that in coming months. But I'm already for him. I'll take the bland technocrat over the laughingstock any day.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
R.I.P., Charlie Wilson: 1933-2010
By Manifesto Joe
U.S. Rep. Charles Wilson, D-Lufkin, couldn't be elected now in the Texas district he represented for 24 years in the U.S. House, and that's a shame.
One could argue that "Good Time Charlie" wasn't quite a role model. Near the end of his time in the House, the Republicans launched a series of campaign ads with a Robin Leach Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous sound-alike chronicling all the swell junkets and such that Charlie had racked up. He lived the high life of a freewheeling old-style politico, and he wasn't ashamed of it.
And, on foreign affairs, Charlie had a hawkish streak that ended up yielding very mixed fruits, to say the least. As was said in the Los Angeles Times obit, Charlie's legacy of getting money for the mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan "grew more complicated as the Muslim freedom fighters that Wilson tirelessly championed evolved into the Taliban, which would ultimately give haven to Al Qaeda." He didn't necessarily have the best judgment, in hindsight.
But on domestic issues, Charlie was a courageous progressive. He even used the word "liberal" in self-description, and did so unabashedly. I would trade in the sober reactionary Republicans who represent most of this state, any day you name, for a slightly whiskey-buzzed Charlie Wilson, any old time.
He had the reputation of a shameless playboy who invited scandal repeatedly during his political career. His congressional office was staffed by a bevy of women obviously hired at least as much for their looks as for their competence. But even the late Molly Ivins commented that, for all those bimbo trappings, Charlie's office was run about as well as anybody's on the Hill.
The public image of Charlie was not accurate, according to one of his closest friends. Again, from the L.A. Times obit:
Wilson's friend of 45 years, Buddy Temple, said the figure presented in the film (Charlie Wilson's War) failed to replicate the man he knew.
"Charlie was a go-to guy in Congress," Temple said at a news conference in Lufkin shortly after Wilson's death Wednesday. "The whole idea that he was this playboy who never paid attention to business was just as wrong as it could be."
This is not the time, but I'll eventually raise a glass of Mr. Jack Daniels to you, Charlie. We could use a few more like you, and a few less like, say, Tom DeLay.
Here's the full L.A. Times obit here.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
U.S. Rep. Charles Wilson, D-Lufkin, couldn't be elected now in the Texas district he represented for 24 years in the U.S. House, and that's a shame.
One could argue that "Good Time Charlie" wasn't quite a role model. Near the end of his time in the House, the Republicans launched a series of campaign ads with a Robin Leach Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous sound-alike chronicling all the swell junkets and such that Charlie had racked up. He lived the high life of a freewheeling old-style politico, and he wasn't ashamed of it.
And, on foreign affairs, Charlie had a hawkish streak that ended up yielding very mixed fruits, to say the least. As was said in the Los Angeles Times obit, Charlie's legacy of getting money for the mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan "grew more complicated as the Muslim freedom fighters that Wilson tirelessly championed evolved into the Taliban, which would ultimately give haven to Al Qaeda." He didn't necessarily have the best judgment, in hindsight.
But on domestic issues, Charlie was a courageous progressive. He even used the word "liberal" in self-description, and did so unabashedly. I would trade in the sober reactionary Republicans who represent most of this state, any day you name, for a slightly whiskey-buzzed Charlie Wilson, any old time.
He had the reputation of a shameless playboy who invited scandal repeatedly during his political career. His congressional office was staffed by a bevy of women obviously hired at least as much for their looks as for their competence. But even the late Molly Ivins commented that, for all those bimbo trappings, Charlie's office was run about as well as anybody's on the Hill.
The public image of Charlie was not accurate, according to one of his closest friends. Again, from the L.A. Times obit:
Wilson's friend of 45 years, Buddy Temple, said the figure presented in the film (Charlie Wilson's War) failed to replicate the man he knew.
"Charlie was a go-to guy in Congress," Temple said at a news conference in Lufkin shortly after Wilson's death Wednesday. "The whole idea that he was this playboy who never paid attention to business was just as wrong as it could be."
This is not the time, but I'll eventually raise a glass of Mr. Jack Daniels to you, Charlie. We could use a few more like you, and a few less like, say, Tom DeLay.
Here's the full L.A. Times obit here.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Untold Story: Regressive Taxation, State And Local
By Manifesto Joe
Debates about taxes tend to be dominated by federal income tax policy. That in itself has become a scandal because of myriad corporate and personal tax dodges. But it ignores what lies at the base of taxation in America. At the state and local levels, taxes hit the poor and the working class hardest, in terms of percentage of income.
My home state of Texas has a special history of this. Sales taxes, user fees and other levies are mostly directed at people with lower incomes. Courtesy of state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, here are some recent statistics:
State and Local Taxes as a Percentage of Household Income in Texas
Over $109,182: 4.7 percent
$69,614 to $109,182: 6.0 percent
$45,271 to $69,614: 6.4 percent
$24,899 to $45,271: 7.6 percent
Under $24,899: 12.8 percent
Source: The Center for Public Policy Priorities, May 2008
If you were to examine all the states, it might even get worse in some of them. In Texas, most groceries are exempt from sales taxes. I lived in Oklahoma for a while, and there, NOTHING is exempt from the sales tax.
The next time you encounter some anus-head doing the Rush Lardbaugh talking points about how the rich are so oppressed with their income tax burden, hit them with some of this. You won't change their "minds," but you might get the pleasure of seeing them stammer and look confused for just a moment.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Debates about taxes tend to be dominated by federal income tax policy. That in itself has become a scandal because of myriad corporate and personal tax dodges. But it ignores what lies at the base of taxation in America. At the state and local levels, taxes hit the poor and the working class hardest, in terms of percentage of income.
My home state of Texas has a special history of this. Sales taxes, user fees and other levies are mostly directed at people with lower incomes. Courtesy of state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, here are some recent statistics:
State and Local Taxes as a Percentage of Household Income in Texas
Over $109,182: 4.7 percent
$69,614 to $109,182: 6.0 percent
$45,271 to $69,614: 6.4 percent
$24,899 to $45,271: 7.6 percent
Under $24,899: 12.8 percent
Source: The Center for Public Policy Priorities, May 2008
If you were to examine all the states, it might even get worse in some of them. In Texas, most groceries are exempt from sales taxes. I lived in Oklahoma for a while, and there, NOTHING is exempt from the sales tax.
The next time you encounter some anus-head doing the Rush Lardbaugh talking points about how the rich are so oppressed with their income tax burden, hit them with some of this. You won't change their "minds," but you might get the pleasure of seeing them stammer and look confused for just a moment.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
An Independent Texas Would Be A Third-World Country
By Manifesto Joe
The jokes about Gov. Rick Perry's veiled threat of Texas secession have faded into collective memory now, but a few of us were given pause to consider the "what ifs" about this.
What if Texas legally could, and did, leave the United States?
If these figures available courtesy of Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, are any barometer, we would be little more than a Third-World country.
Here are some nuggets from the senator's Web site about Texas' standing when stacked up in 2007 against the other 49 states:
Percentage of Uninsured Children
1st
Income Inequality Between the Rich and the Poor
2nd
Percentage of Population without Health Insurance
1st
Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) Scores
47th
Percentage of Population over 25 with a High School Diploma
50th
Percentage of Non-Elderly Women with Health Insurance
50th
Rate of Women Aged 40+ Who Receive Mammograms
44th
Rate of Women Aged 18+ Who Receive Pap Smears
47th
Cervical Cancer Rate
5th
Women's Voter Registration
43rd
Women's Voter Turnout
49th
Percentage of Eligible Voters that Vote
44th
For more on the subject, go here.
And the coup de grase: The president of our great reborn republic would apparently be (you guessed it) Rick Perry, he of the 2.3 GPA as an animal husbandry graduate of Texas A&M.
Am I sure that a dolt like Perry would be somebody that an independent Texas would actually elect as its president? I suppose nothing in this life is truly certain, but a recent piece of evidence points to this as the case.
Perry has been governor since Il Doofus resigned in December 2000 to go on to bigger and more horrific things, and Perry is finally facing his first serious challenge for re-election, from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. Hutch is almost certain to go through with a challenge in the 2010 Republican Primary.
There's one big problem with her chances. She's regarded as a moderate (chortle) in this state, and the Texas Republican Party still wants the U.S. to unleash Chiang Kai-shek's skeletal remains on the mainland of Red China.
A poll conducted jointly by the Texas Politics Project and the University of Texas' department of government had Perry with a 12-percentage-point lead over Hutch, 38-26. Let's face it, the 'necks will go to the polls for Governor Goodhair, not for Kay Bailey H.
And although Democrats here have made a few admirable gains in recent years, they are still in a shambles when it comes to having a viable challenger for governor. The undecideds are way ahead among Democrats; but among those potential voters who have made up their minds, the poll leader is Kinky Friedman, with 12 percent.
Kinky, for those unfamiliar, is a veteran Austin singer-songwriter and humorist whose talents in those areas are considerable. But in his foray into Texas politics in 2006, he was inept as a politician, made a gaping ass of himself in debate, and ultimately split the meager progressive vote here in a year in which Perry seemed a bit vulnerable (He won re-election with 40 percent of the vote against three challengers).
Rather than talking this horseshit about seceding from the union, Texans should be damned glad of the union. It's damned near the only thing that keeps us from becoming Guatemala.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
The jokes about Gov. Rick Perry's veiled threat of Texas secession have faded into collective memory now, but a few of us were given pause to consider the "what ifs" about this.
What if Texas legally could, and did, leave the United States?
If these figures available courtesy of Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, are any barometer, we would be little more than a Third-World country.
Here are some nuggets from the senator's Web site about Texas' standing when stacked up in 2007 against the other 49 states:
Percentage of Uninsured Children
1st
Income Inequality Between the Rich and the Poor
2nd
Percentage of Population without Health Insurance
1st
Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) Scores
47th
Percentage of Population over 25 with a High School Diploma
50th
Percentage of Non-Elderly Women with Health Insurance
50th
Rate of Women Aged 40+ Who Receive Mammograms
44th
Rate of Women Aged 18+ Who Receive Pap Smears
47th
Cervical Cancer Rate
5th
Women's Voter Registration
43rd
Women's Voter Turnout
49th
Percentage of Eligible Voters that Vote
44th
For more on the subject, go here.
And the coup de grase: The president of our great reborn republic would apparently be (you guessed it) Rick Perry, he of the 2.3 GPA as an animal husbandry graduate of Texas A&M.
Am I sure that a dolt like Perry would be somebody that an independent Texas would actually elect as its president? I suppose nothing in this life is truly certain, but a recent piece of evidence points to this as the case.
Perry has been governor since Il Doofus resigned in December 2000 to go on to bigger and more horrific things, and Perry is finally facing his first serious challenge for re-election, from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. Hutch is almost certain to go through with a challenge in the 2010 Republican Primary.
There's one big problem with her chances. She's regarded as a moderate (chortle) in this state, and the Texas Republican Party still wants the U.S. to unleash Chiang Kai-shek's skeletal remains on the mainland of Red China.
A poll conducted jointly by the Texas Politics Project and the University of Texas' department of government had Perry with a 12-percentage-point lead over Hutch, 38-26. Let's face it, the 'necks will go to the polls for Governor Goodhair, not for Kay Bailey H.
And although Democrats here have made a few admirable gains in recent years, they are still in a shambles when it comes to having a viable challenger for governor. The undecideds are way ahead among Democrats; but among those potential voters who have made up their minds, the poll leader is Kinky Friedman, with 12 percent.
Kinky, for those unfamiliar, is a veteran Austin singer-songwriter and humorist whose talents in those areas are considerable. But in his foray into Texas politics in 2006, he was inept as a politician, made a gaping ass of himself in debate, and ultimately split the meager progressive vote here in a year in which Perry seemed a bit vulnerable (He won re-election with 40 percent of the vote against three challengers).
Rather than talking this horseshit about seceding from the union, Texans should be damned glad of the union. It's damned near the only thing that keeps us from becoming Guatemala.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
With Lubbock Vote, Neo-Prohibitionist Movement Seems To Have Finally Passed Out
By Manifesto Joe
Lubbock, Texas, is certainly the biggest "dry" city in Texas (population about 210,000) and perhaps the largest "dry" one in the U.S. If the early returns are accurate, that is about to change. The Associated Press reports that in a local election, Lubbock voters are favoring beer, wine and liquor sales in stores, by 64 percent in early counts.
The city has had a weird system for years. You could get "liquor-by-the-drink" in a bar or restaurant inside the city limits. But there were (and are) no package stores, and you couldn't get a six-pack in a convenience store. The city has the biggest university in that desolate region, Texas Tech, and the students of age there have to go to a "wet" suburb to buy a bottle of wine. (Or a case of beer -- now, doesn't that sound like a bright idea? I'll get to that irony later.)
I grew up in a "dry" town, but one that had smaller towns nearby where miscreants would sell any kind of booze to just about anybody, even 16-year-olds. I don't recall that those in-town conditions stopped anyone from drinking.
My family was religious and generally teetotaling; I recall being about 11 and taking a ride home with a Little League teammate of mine, and seeing an astonishing thing. My buddy's dad, home from his job as an offshore oil-rig roughneck, was behind the wheel and taking swigs of whiskey out of a "fifth" bottle. Little Buddy-roo and I were in the back seat, watching the spectacle of old Ken as he passed this rather large bottle to his bud in the front passenger seat. I'm not sure, but I think they were also chasing with beer.
I was too young to realize that these older dudes were actually risking the lives of little J.T. and me in the back seat. But there wasn't much traffic on small-town streets and semirural roads, and this seemed to be something intrinsic to the local culture. Because liquor couldn't be had just anywhere, these men (and quite a few women) would drive long distances to get it. And, in doing so, they didn't seem to think much about the consequences of driving while consuming, except to evade the local gendarmes. My recollection is that this wasn't hard to do.
Attitudes have changed for the better since 1967, even in Gothic regions like where I grew up. But this drove home a point: Prohibition actually, ironically, encourages binge drinking, and also drunken driving.
On a long-ago vacation, I remember passing through a flat, dry West Texas hamlet on the way to New Mexico. This place had a reported population of about 400; but this was Saturday night, and it looked like some kind of mini-Vegas. Looking around at the local commerce, it wasn't hard to figure out what the attraction was.
They might as well have changed the name of this little place to "Beer." For population, they might as well have put on there: Weekdays, 400. Weekends, 10,000.
A certainty is that these genuine and drugstore cowboys, who had come to town that night in their F-2000 pickup trucks, were unlikely to drive 40 or more miles back home without having had a few brewskis. And just maybe, more than a few. And maybe that was just a chaser for some hard liquor. Being a native of this region, I can tell you, there aren't very many Merlot-sipping men living outside of Highland Park.
I actually saw stranger, more opposite things in New Mexico, like package stores adjoining bars. There, a feller can git half-swacked in the bar, then finish the job by picking up a bottle for a nightcap on the way home! Again, one little blessing is that a lot of roads in this part of the world are straight and not well-traveled.
In Arizona, I saw strange, opposite things as well. You can buy hard liquor in a 7-Eleven until wee hours. It's nearly like that in Louisiana, too. And California is far more lenient than Texas, in some ways.
Then, there are the serious Puritans. I've never been to Utah, but I know someone who lived there. The Mormons are surprisingly tolerant of liquor-drinking miscreants. They just require their liquor stores to look like mini-Leavenworths. They want to make certain that their Jack Mormons feel like sleazy reprobates.
I lived in Oklahoma for a short time, and the package stores there look like low-rent warehouses, with very minimal advertising. You can't buy cold 5 percent beer anywhere in the state legally -- the real stuff has to come from a package store, and you have to chill it yourself. In 7-Eleven, they offer a relic of Prohibition, 3.2 percent beer. (They have that stuff in Colorado, too, but not with as many
other restrictions.) I recall a Lawton, Oklahoma, store clerk giving me a stern moral lecture when I was surprised that I couldn't get real beer in a corner store there -- "You gotta keep yore nose real clean up hyere, Tex ..."
And yet, living in Oklahoma, while I was jogging on residential streets, I don't remember anywhere else where I saw as many empty pint bottles of Wild Turkey littering the gutters. Obviously people were riding around in cars drinking hard liquor, then tossing their empties.
The point is that Prohibition measures, even partial ones, clearly do not work. They just make people drink furtively, and actually encourage them to drive far pieces to get it.
Similar arguments can be framed regarding marijuana, but I'll save that for another post.
Anyway, my hat's off to the folks out in Lubbock, for finally seeing reason. I don't own a real cowboy hat -- I like fedoras and a few variations -- but I'll take those off to the good folks of Lubbock. I might have gone to Texas Tech, but I went to a small Lutheran college instead. Lutherans don't have major problems with beer.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Lubbock, Texas, is certainly the biggest "dry" city in Texas (population about 210,000) and perhaps the largest "dry" one in the U.S. If the early returns are accurate, that is about to change. The Associated Press reports that in a local election, Lubbock voters are favoring beer, wine and liquor sales in stores, by 64 percent in early counts.
The city has had a weird system for years. You could get "liquor-by-the-drink" in a bar or restaurant inside the city limits. But there were (and are) no package stores, and you couldn't get a six-pack in a convenience store. The city has the biggest university in that desolate region, Texas Tech, and the students of age there have to go to a "wet" suburb to buy a bottle of wine. (Or a case of beer -- now, doesn't that sound like a bright idea? I'll get to that irony later.)
I grew up in a "dry" town, but one that had smaller towns nearby where miscreants would sell any kind of booze to just about anybody, even 16-year-olds. I don't recall that those in-town conditions stopped anyone from drinking.
My family was religious and generally teetotaling; I recall being about 11 and taking a ride home with a Little League teammate of mine, and seeing an astonishing thing. My buddy's dad, home from his job as an offshore oil-rig roughneck, was behind the wheel and taking swigs of whiskey out of a "fifth" bottle. Little Buddy-roo and I were in the back seat, watching the spectacle of old Ken as he passed this rather large bottle to his bud in the front passenger seat. I'm not sure, but I think they were also chasing with beer.
I was too young to realize that these older dudes were actually risking the lives of little J.T. and me in the back seat. But there wasn't much traffic on small-town streets and semirural roads, and this seemed to be something intrinsic to the local culture. Because liquor couldn't be had just anywhere, these men (and quite a few women) would drive long distances to get it. And, in doing so, they didn't seem to think much about the consequences of driving while consuming, except to evade the local gendarmes. My recollection is that this wasn't hard to do.
Attitudes have changed for the better since 1967, even in Gothic regions like where I grew up. But this drove home a point: Prohibition actually, ironically, encourages binge drinking, and also drunken driving.
On a long-ago vacation, I remember passing through a flat, dry West Texas hamlet on the way to New Mexico. This place had a reported population of about 400; but this was Saturday night, and it looked like some kind of mini-Vegas. Looking around at the local commerce, it wasn't hard to figure out what the attraction was.
They might as well have changed the name of this little place to "Beer." For population, they might as well have put on there: Weekdays, 400. Weekends, 10,000.
A certainty is that these genuine and drugstore cowboys, who had come to town that night in their F-2000 pickup trucks, were unlikely to drive 40 or more miles back home without having had a few brewskis. And just maybe, more than a few. And maybe that was just a chaser for some hard liquor. Being a native of this region, I can tell you, there aren't very many Merlot-sipping men living outside of Highland Park.
I actually saw stranger, more opposite things in New Mexico, like package stores adjoining bars. There, a feller can git half-swacked in the bar, then finish the job by picking up a bottle for a nightcap on the way home! Again, one little blessing is that a lot of roads in this part of the world are straight and not well-traveled.
In Arizona, I saw strange, opposite things as well. You can buy hard liquor in a 7-Eleven until wee hours. It's nearly like that in Louisiana, too. And California is far more lenient than Texas, in some ways.
Then, there are the serious Puritans. I've never been to Utah, but I know someone who lived there. The Mormons are surprisingly tolerant of liquor-drinking miscreants. They just require their liquor stores to look like mini-Leavenworths. They want to make certain that their Jack Mormons feel like sleazy reprobates.
I lived in Oklahoma for a short time, and the package stores there look like low-rent warehouses, with very minimal advertising. You can't buy cold 5 percent beer anywhere in the state legally -- the real stuff has to come from a package store, and you have to chill it yourself. In 7-Eleven, they offer a relic of Prohibition, 3.2 percent beer. (They have that stuff in Colorado, too, but not with as many
other restrictions.) I recall a Lawton, Oklahoma, store clerk giving me a stern moral lecture when I was surprised that I couldn't get real beer in a corner store there -- "You gotta keep yore nose real clean up hyere, Tex ..."
And yet, living in Oklahoma, while I was jogging on residential streets, I don't remember anywhere else where I saw as many empty pint bottles of Wild Turkey littering the gutters. Obviously people were riding around in cars drinking hard liquor, then tossing their empties.
The point is that Prohibition measures, even partial ones, clearly do not work. They just make people drink furtively, and actually encourage them to drive far pieces to get it.
Similar arguments can be framed regarding marijuana, but I'll save that for another post.
Anyway, my hat's off to the folks out in Lubbock, for finally seeing reason. I don't own a real cowboy hat -- I like fedoras and a few variations -- but I'll take those off to the good folks of Lubbock. I might have gone to Texas Tech, but I went to a small Lutheran college instead. Lutherans don't have major problems with beer.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Governor Goodhair Redux: Texas Becomes Laughingstock Of D.C.
By Manifesto Joe
I promised more on Governor Goodhair. It seems that in our nation's capital, people are still, two weeks later, talking about Gov. Rick Perry's veiled threat of Texas secession. It's become the most popular joke on Capitol Hill.
It's been no secret to many of us here, for years, that we have a nice-looking cretin for a governor. I suppose that's a marginal improvement over an anthropoid-looking cretin. I refer here to Perry's predecessor, the one they call W., who recently left the White House. (Also known as Chimpy, and here as Il Doofus.)
But a cretin is still a cretin. In a state that once produced the likes of LBJ, Sam Rayburn, Olin Teague, Ralph Yarborough and others, it's frustrating to watch the procession of Republican half-wits in high office. Hell, I'd settle for Jim Wright, or even DINO Lloyd Bentsen.
Texas Democrats seized the day on this one. There's a T-shirt in circulation with Perry's face on it, with something like, "Republican Class of '09 -- most likely to secede."
The national comedians didn't miss this. Jay Leno, I thought, had the best line: He hoped that Texas really would secede from the Union "so we can invade them for their oil."
In Washington, McClatchy Newspapers reported this:
Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D- San Antonio, said dryly, "It has been a topic of conversation. We have been the butt of many jokes." His favorite suggestion: "that Charlie Gonzalez be ambassador to the U.S. from Texas."
"I’m bilingual; I speak English and Texan," he said.
But on a more serious note, he said: "I think the governor got carried away. You see posturing in preparation for the Republican primary. It serves no useful purpose."
Perry is all but certain to be challenged by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2010 GOP primary, and political analysts say the governor is playing to the party’s conservative base with his anti-government stance. Perry is one of a handful of GOP governors who have refused part of the federal stimulus money, specifically, $555 million for Texas in additional unemployment funds.
But the secession suggestion isn’t playing well with one Texas conservative: Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a former state Supreme Court judge.
"Well, I don’t think it’s particularly useful," he told reporters during his weekly interview. "The legal response is 'you can’t do it.’ We fought a Civil War. You can’t do it."
For the entire McClatchy story, here's the link.
This is clearly a gamble by Perry for the redneck vote, which is considerable in this state. But the sheer ignorance of this won't be lost on everybody -- apparently it wasn't lost even on the likes of Sen. John "Cornhole" Cornyn. And it may not be lost on all those unemployed people who will be denied benefits because of Governor Goodhair's grandstanding.
Not that Kay the Breck Girl (R.I.P. Molly Ivins) would be much of an improvement, but my money's on ol' Kay Bailey for next year's GOP gubernatorial nomination. We have it on authority as high as Kelly Clarkson that Kay has great taste in fragrances. And she was a UT cheerleader, while Perry was a "yell" leader at A&M.
Well, marginal improvements are better than none.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
I promised more on Governor Goodhair. It seems that in our nation's capital, people are still, two weeks later, talking about Gov. Rick Perry's veiled threat of Texas secession. It's become the most popular joke on Capitol Hill.
It's been no secret to many of us here, for years, that we have a nice-looking cretin for a governor. I suppose that's a marginal improvement over an anthropoid-looking cretin. I refer here to Perry's predecessor, the one they call W., who recently left the White House. (Also known as Chimpy, and here as Il Doofus.)
But a cretin is still a cretin. In a state that once produced the likes of LBJ, Sam Rayburn, Olin Teague, Ralph Yarborough and others, it's frustrating to watch the procession of Republican half-wits in high office. Hell, I'd settle for Jim Wright, or even DINO Lloyd Bentsen.
Texas Democrats seized the day on this one. There's a T-shirt in circulation with Perry's face on it, with something like, "Republican Class of '09 -- most likely to secede."
The national comedians didn't miss this. Jay Leno, I thought, had the best line: He hoped that Texas really would secede from the Union "so we can invade them for their oil."
In Washington, McClatchy Newspapers reported this:
Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D- San Antonio, said dryly, "It has been a topic of conversation. We have been the butt of many jokes." His favorite suggestion: "that Charlie Gonzalez be ambassador to the U.S. from Texas."
"I’m bilingual; I speak English and Texan," he said.
But on a more serious note, he said: "I think the governor got carried away. You see posturing in preparation for the Republican primary. It serves no useful purpose."
Perry is all but certain to be challenged by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2010 GOP primary, and political analysts say the governor is playing to the party’s conservative base with his anti-government stance. Perry is one of a handful of GOP governors who have refused part of the federal stimulus money, specifically, $555 million for Texas in additional unemployment funds.
But the secession suggestion isn’t playing well with one Texas conservative: Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a former state Supreme Court judge.
"Well, I don’t think it’s particularly useful," he told reporters during his weekly interview. "The legal response is 'you can’t do it.’ We fought a Civil War. You can’t do it."
For the entire McClatchy story, here's the link.
This is clearly a gamble by Perry for the redneck vote, which is considerable in this state. But the sheer ignorance of this won't be lost on everybody -- apparently it wasn't lost even on the likes of Sen. John "Cornhole" Cornyn. And it may not be lost on all those unemployed people who will be denied benefits because of Governor Goodhair's grandstanding.
Not that Kay the Breck Girl (R.I.P. Molly Ivins) would be much of an improvement, but my money's on ol' Kay Bailey for next year's GOP gubernatorial nomination. We have it on authority as high as Kelly Clarkson that Kay has great taste in fragrances. And she was a UT cheerleader, while Perry was a "yell" leader at A&M.
Well, marginal improvements are better than none.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Why Does Governor Goodhair Hate America?
By Manifesto Joe
By now I suppose that everybody who follows matters political knows that the governor of my state, Rick Perry, made a statement at a tax day "Tea Party" gathering that strongly suggested that Texas might, under great duress, want to secede from the Union.
I had hoped Governor Goodhair meant that we Texans could all just get out of the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers en masse. There ain't very many of us who is members of them there union outfits anyway, so there would be no change that anyone outside Texas urban areas would notice.
But unfortunately, I don't think that's quite what Governor Goodhair meant. He was probably pandering to the rubes, the people who don't quite get it -- that the reason they drive on paved streets, can cross bridges without crashing into the river, can get their elderly parents on Social Security, that their children can construct English sentences even if they haven't gone to Yale, is because taxes are collected.
There are a couple of things to remember about the governor's statement. One is that he's facing a potentially tough campaign for re-election, even though he's already been the state's longest-serving governor. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, appears to be tired of Washington and seems to want a swell job back home. She sort of looks like a moderate Republican by Texas standards, so Perry may be setting up early to line up the right-wing yahoo base.
Then there's the matter of intellect. Rick Perry has a great head of dark hair, and from all the female accounts that I've heard, he is the closest thing to a Ken doll we've ever had in high office in this state. But, as the late Molly Ivins often pointed out, Governor Goodhair ain't the sharpest pencil in the box. He's a grad of Texas A&M -- not a place known for high academic distinction -- and he majored in animal husbandry. His grade-point average was 2.3. Oh, by the way, he was an Aggie cheerleader.
This would explain why he's not quite up to the legal and civics questions here, i.e., that it actually would be quite illegal for Texas to quit the Union. The bozos actually did it along with several other Southern states back in 1861, and the sad result was 600,000 Americans killed on the battlefield. I guess they don't teach much about the Civil War in Animal Husbandry 101.
But I don't think Goodhair's lack of cultural literacy is to blame here. He's looking ahead to 14 years in the Governor's Mansion, and CNBC's Chris Matthews tells me that 31% of Texans who responded to a poll actually think that Texas has a legal right to secede from the Union. He's cynically betting that the ignorant rubes in this state are numerous enough to get him past Kay Bailey in a nasty 2010 Republican primary.
To read the latest on this, here's a link to the Houston Chronicle's online edition. Also, there will be more about our illustrious Governor Goodhair in subsequent posts.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
By now I suppose that everybody who follows matters political knows that the governor of my state, Rick Perry, made a statement at a tax day "Tea Party" gathering that strongly suggested that Texas might, under great duress, want to secede from the Union.
I had hoped Governor Goodhair meant that we Texans could all just get out of the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers en masse. There ain't very many of us who is members of them there union outfits anyway, so there would be no change that anyone outside Texas urban areas would notice.
But unfortunately, I don't think that's quite what Governor Goodhair meant. He was probably pandering to the rubes, the people who don't quite get it -- that the reason they drive on paved streets, can cross bridges without crashing into the river, can get their elderly parents on Social Security, that their children can construct English sentences even if they haven't gone to Yale, is because taxes are collected.
There are a couple of things to remember about the governor's statement. One is that he's facing a potentially tough campaign for re-election, even though he's already been the state's longest-serving governor. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, appears to be tired of Washington and seems to want a swell job back home. She sort of looks like a moderate Republican by Texas standards, so Perry may be setting up early to line up the right-wing yahoo base.
Then there's the matter of intellect. Rick Perry has a great head of dark hair, and from all the female accounts that I've heard, he is the closest thing to a Ken doll we've ever had in high office in this state. But, as the late Molly Ivins often pointed out, Governor Goodhair ain't the sharpest pencil in the box. He's a grad of Texas A&M -- not a place known for high academic distinction -- and he majored in animal husbandry. His grade-point average was 2.3. Oh, by the way, he was an Aggie cheerleader.
This would explain why he's not quite up to the legal and civics questions here, i.e., that it actually would be quite illegal for Texas to quit the Union. The bozos actually did it along with several other Southern states back in 1861, and the sad result was 600,000 Americans killed on the battlefield. I guess they don't teach much about the Civil War in Animal Husbandry 101.
But I don't think Goodhair's lack of cultural literacy is to blame here. He's looking ahead to 14 years in the Governor's Mansion, and CNBC's Chris Matthews tells me that 31% of Texans who responded to a poll actually think that Texas has a legal right to secede from the Union. He's cynically betting that the ignorant rubes in this state are numerous enough to get him past Kay Bailey in a nasty 2010 Republican primary.
To read the latest on this, here's a link to the Houston Chronicle's online edition. Also, there will be more about our illustrious Governor Goodhair in subsequent posts.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Hey, Y'all, And Youse Guys -- Enough Stereotypes
By Manifesto Joe
Normally, I try to be as supportive as possible of any lefty blogger out there. "Viva la causa," as certain Tejanos say. But I'm seeing too much depiction of Southern whites, especially us Texans, as being irredeemably ignorant. My experience is that ignorance is very much an equal-opportunity employer.
This is only one example of such plowboy-bashing. One will do. Here's the link. See the piece titled, "Lincoln Screwed Up -- Let's Fix It."
I've lived among necks vermillion long enough to understand this sentiment. But I've also known people from many other backgrounds who had all the same problems, and perhaps a few more.
Here was my response in the comments:
Not only do Yankees harbor a lot of stereotypes about us Texans –
– Your pot roast and bean soup are bland enough to serve in jails or a college cafeteria (you all seem to have gotten the notion that chile peppers really will eat holes in your stomach).
– In the (Republican) Dakotas and points east of there, you still have people who sound like, "My name is Yon Yonson, I leeve in Visconsin, I vork in a lumber mill zere!" They guzzle a lot of something they call "pop" that we call soda water or soft drinks down here. I know all this from having attended a Lutheran college.
– You have places up there like Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I think they still have active chapters of America First. And Indiana was the state with the biggest Klan membership back in the '20s. One of the most stupifyingly bigoted Religious Right types I have ever known was from Minnesota (that's "Meene-soat-a" up there). He was definitely acquainted with the "N" word, and believed quite sincerely that any person who had ever heard the name of Jesus even mentioned, and did not immediately convert, was damned to everlasting perdition.
– Bush and Cheney are not native Texans. Cheney is from Wyoming, the heart of Red-state Yankeeland, and Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and "educated" mostly at blueblood Yankee schools. His Texas accent is reputed to be largely an acquired affectation.
Anyway, enough with all the stereotypes, Southern or Northern, yours or mine. In post-Bush America, let's try to live peacefully without them.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Normally, I try to be as supportive as possible of any lefty blogger out there. "Viva la causa," as certain Tejanos say. But I'm seeing too much depiction of Southern whites, especially us Texans, as being irredeemably ignorant. My experience is that ignorance is very much an equal-opportunity employer.
This is only one example of such plowboy-bashing. One will do. Here's the link. See the piece titled, "Lincoln Screwed Up -- Let's Fix It."
I've lived among necks vermillion long enough to understand this sentiment. But I've also known people from many other backgrounds who had all the same problems, and perhaps a few more.
Here was my response in the comments:
Not only do Yankees harbor a lot of stereotypes about us Texans –
– Your pot roast and bean soup are bland enough to serve in jails or a college cafeteria (you all seem to have gotten the notion that chile peppers really will eat holes in your stomach).
– In the (Republican) Dakotas and points east of there, you still have people who sound like, "My name is Yon Yonson, I leeve in Visconsin, I vork in a lumber mill zere!" They guzzle a lot of something they call "pop" that we call soda water or soft drinks down here. I know all this from having attended a Lutheran college.
– You have places up there like Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I think they still have active chapters of America First. And Indiana was the state with the biggest Klan membership back in the '20s. One of the most stupifyingly bigoted Religious Right types I have ever known was from Minnesota (that's "Meene-soat-a" up there). He was definitely acquainted with the "N" word, and believed quite sincerely that any person who had ever heard the name of Jesus even mentioned, and did not immediately convert, was damned to everlasting perdition.
– Bush and Cheney are not native Texans. Cheney is from Wyoming, the heart of Red-state Yankeeland, and Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and "educated" mostly at blueblood Yankee schools. His Texas accent is reputed to be largely an acquired affectation.
Anyway, enough with all the stereotypes, Southern or Northern, yours or mine. In post-Bush America, let's try to live peacefully without them.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting For Texas To Turn Blue
By Manifesto Joe
Amid Democratic/progressive/liberal euphoria, most understandable after the past eight years, there's been talk that even states like my home sweet home Texas could possibly be flipped for the Dems, and soon.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Texans to turn blue. You'll literally turn blue long before. We've got another generation to go here before the demographics of this very distinctive but chauvinistic state will change that much.
The percentage breakdown (all figures courtesy CNN Politics) was 55% McCain, 44% Obama, 1% all others. That was promising, surprisingly good at 44% for a mixed-race liberal Democrat in a state that still has so many Dixiecrats.
The urban areas are where you can see the changes that are eventually coming. In Dallas County, Obama kicked McCain's ass shockingly, 57-42%. Travis County (home of dear old liberal college town Austin) it was 64-35% Obama!!!
Obama pulled out Harris County (Houston, America's 4th-largest city), 50-49%. There, the African-American vote, 95% for Obama, was the clear difference. He won Bexar County (San Antonio) by a decent margin, 52-47%, and that's in a place with a big military vote. The dominance of Obama in Hispanic Texas was most obvious in El Paso County, 66-33% -- and there's a big military vote there, too. He also took most of deep South Texas, my old stomping grounds.
Even in Tarrant County, which has become Texas' answer to California's right-wing Orange County, there was good news for Democrats. Fort Worth delivered for Republicans much as it has in recent years, making the county breakdown the very same as the state's, 55-44% for Big Mac. There's a lot of old oil and gas money there that more than offsets the minority voting blocs. But the Dallas-FortWorth midcity of Arlington, home of centrally located amusement parks and sports stadiums, split 50-50%. The demographics there are definitely changing.
But there was plenty of discouraging news. Nueces County (Corpus Christi) is largely Hispanic, but went 52-47% for McCain. There must still be lots of priest-ridden Catholics down there. And when you track the vote out into the boondocks -- East Texas, outlying central areas of the Hill Country, the South Plains, the Panhandle, the rest of the west ... well, McCain just cleaned up.
Candidly, the story is just this simple. McCain and the other Republicans held on to the redneck vote.
It's discouraging, in that the Democratic Party actually fielded a fine candidate for U.S. Senate, state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston. Noriega polled just about evenly with Obama in a race against one of the most vapid (but well-funded) members of the Senate, Bush cheerleader John Cornyn.
What is clear from the results is that there is still a deeply ingrained "rube" vote in this state, the kind of people who would never, ever have given Obama any decent hearing, let alone serious consideration. I will refrain from using any stronger language about them.
Significantly, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently reported that many voters in Wise County, some of them Democrats, voted the straight GOP ticket because they wouldn't vote for any Democrats on a ticket headed by Obama. In so doing, they elected a guy to the office of constable who is affiliated with the Minuteman vigilante organization, devoted to chasing real or supposed illegal immigrants around the state.
Change can eventually come to places like my home state. But sadly, it is often glacial in pace. I got used to being in the beleaguered minority many years ago, so I can live with it for now. I hope, along with the optimists among progressives, to see it change before I die.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Amid Democratic/progressive/liberal euphoria, most understandable after the past eight years, there's been talk that even states like my home sweet home Texas could possibly be flipped for the Dems, and soon.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Texans to turn blue. You'll literally turn blue long before. We've got another generation to go here before the demographics of this very distinctive but chauvinistic state will change that much.
The percentage breakdown (all figures courtesy CNN Politics) was 55% McCain, 44% Obama, 1% all others. That was promising, surprisingly good at 44% for a mixed-race liberal Democrat in a state that still has so many Dixiecrats.
The urban areas are where you can see the changes that are eventually coming. In Dallas County, Obama kicked McCain's ass shockingly, 57-42%. Travis County (home of dear old liberal college town Austin) it was 64-35% Obama!!!
Obama pulled out Harris County (Houston, America's 4th-largest city), 50-49%. There, the African-American vote, 95% for Obama, was the clear difference. He won Bexar County (San Antonio) by a decent margin, 52-47%, and that's in a place with a big military vote. The dominance of Obama in Hispanic Texas was most obvious in El Paso County, 66-33% -- and there's a big military vote there, too. He also took most of deep South Texas, my old stomping grounds.
Even in Tarrant County, which has become Texas' answer to California's right-wing Orange County, there was good news for Democrats. Fort Worth delivered for Republicans much as it has in recent years, making the county breakdown the very same as the state's, 55-44% for Big Mac. There's a lot of old oil and gas money there that more than offsets the minority voting blocs. But the Dallas-FortWorth midcity of Arlington, home of centrally located amusement parks and sports stadiums, split 50-50%. The demographics there are definitely changing.
But there was plenty of discouraging news. Nueces County (Corpus Christi) is largely Hispanic, but went 52-47% for McCain. There must still be lots of priest-ridden Catholics down there. And when you track the vote out into the boondocks -- East Texas, outlying central areas of the Hill Country, the South Plains, the Panhandle, the rest of the west ... well, McCain just cleaned up.
Candidly, the story is just this simple. McCain and the other Republicans held on to the redneck vote.
It's discouraging, in that the Democratic Party actually fielded a fine candidate for U.S. Senate, state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston. Noriega polled just about evenly with Obama in a race against one of the most vapid (but well-funded) members of the Senate, Bush cheerleader John Cornyn.
What is clear from the results is that there is still a deeply ingrained "rube" vote in this state, the kind of people who would never, ever have given Obama any decent hearing, let alone serious consideration. I will refrain from using any stronger language about them.
Significantly, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently reported that many voters in Wise County, some of them Democrats, voted the straight GOP ticket because they wouldn't vote for any Democrats on a ticket headed by Obama. In so doing, they elected a guy to the office of constable who is affiliated with the Minuteman vigilante organization, devoted to chasing real or supposed illegal immigrants around the state.
Change can eventually come to places like my home state. But sadly, it is often glacial in pace. I got used to being in the beleaguered minority many years ago, so I can live with it for now. I hope, along with the optimists among progressives, to see it change before I die.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Cornyn Watch: The Apparatchik Has Mucho Dinero, So Noriega Vs. Cornyn Will Be David Vs. Goliath
By Manifesto Joe
In Texas, we've gotten used to perennially uneven contests. They reflect a dysfunctional plutocracy, and then the beneficiaries try to pass it off as "democratic."
The latest on Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas and shill supreme for Il Doofus, is that he's floating (not swimming -- that actually takes work) atop a veritable ocean of donations. According to the April 20 "PoliTex" blog of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
The first-term Republican announced this week (now last) that he has raised $1.6 million since winning the March primary in a walk. That gives him $8.7 million in the bank for his race against Democratic state Rep. Rick Noriega. ...
Noriega's camp said the Houston Democrat raised $478,548 for the first quarter of 2008 and has about $329,000 on hand.
It's easy to understand why Texas isn't the best place to go up against the smug forces of evil plutocracy in America. It's practically Ground Zero for that: all those oil and natural gas thieves, reactionary agricultural interests, unregulated scam businesses, practitioners of the new sex slavery, human trafficking, sweatshops ... you name it, we've got it.
A fight for decency has got to start somewhere.
John Cornyn, with his laissez-faire Republican philosophy, represents, at best, an ineffectual, privileged status quo. At worst, he is a de facto mouthpiece for the very people who brought the underground Third World here. As one of the typical "conservatives" of his generation who demonizes government, he always played into the hands of the wealthy who routinely hired undocumented gardeners and maids because they worked cheap. But now, the monied ones are unseemly indignant when the restaurant help can't speak a lot of English. Such an inconvenience.
Enter state Rep. Rick Noriega, D-Houston. This is a man who embodies the greatness of Texas' Hispanic heritage, one who could show us the path to a far better state. If Rick can get the crucial backing he needs, I think he has a real chance to topple our reigning Ken Doll in November.
More about Rick, from his Web site:
Rick was raised in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Mt. Carmel High School in 1976 and attended Alvin Junior College on a Rusk athletic scholarship. It was during these formative years that he learned to work hard to get far in life.
In 1984, Rick completed his undergraduate education with the help of an ROTC scholarship at the University of Houston, receiving his commission in the United States Army. He went on to earn a Master's Degree in Public Administration in 1990 at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was an editor of the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy.
Rick felt compelled to answer the call and serve in the U.S. Army in the wake of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. He was an airborne school and service commander of the 143rd Infantry Detachment (Long-Range Surveillance), an aide to Brigadier General David Heuer, and aide-de-camp to General Samuel Turk, Adjutant General of the Texas Army National Guard.
But Rick's service in the Army did not end there. He became a Lieutenant Colonel in the Texas Army National Guard, and served as deputy garrison commander of the KMTC training facility in Kabul, Afghanistan after 9/11. Rick was deployed in Afghanistan for a total of 14 months until August 2005, and he was also the Laredo Border Sector Commander in Operation Jump Start during the summer of 2006.
Upon his return from Afghanistan, Rick was tapped by Mayor Bill White as Incident Commander of Houston's Hurricane Katrina relief efforts at the George R. Brown Convention Center. His leadership with the military, as well as his record in community service, was crucial as the GRB was transformed into a virtual city that cared for nearly 30,000 evacuees, and was then dismantled in the course of less than a month. At the center, Rick coordinated medical, employment, travel, housing and food services for more than 2,000 evacuees living on-site.
In Texas, we've gotten used to perennially uneven contests. They reflect a dysfunctional plutocracy, and then the beneficiaries try to pass it off as "democratic."
The latest on Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas and shill supreme for Il Doofus, is that he's floating (not swimming -- that actually takes work) atop a veritable ocean of donations. According to the April 20 "PoliTex" blog of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
The first-term Republican announced this week (now last) that he has raised $1.6 million since winning the March primary in a walk. That gives him $8.7 million in the bank for his race against Democratic state Rep. Rick Noriega. ...
Noriega's camp said the Houston Democrat raised $478,548 for the first quarter of 2008 and has about $329,000 on hand.
It's easy to understand why Texas isn't the best place to go up against the smug forces of evil plutocracy in America. It's practically Ground Zero for that: all those oil and natural gas thieves, reactionary agricultural interests, unregulated scam businesses, practitioners of the new sex slavery, human trafficking, sweatshops ... you name it, we've got it.
A fight for decency has got to start somewhere.
John Cornyn, with his laissez-faire Republican philosophy, represents, at best, an ineffectual, privileged status quo. At worst, he is a de facto mouthpiece for the very people who brought the underground Third World here. As one of the typical "conservatives" of his generation who demonizes government, he always played into the hands of the wealthy who routinely hired undocumented gardeners and maids because they worked cheap. But now, the monied ones are unseemly indignant when the restaurant help can't speak a lot of English. Such an inconvenience.
Enter state Rep. Rick Noriega, D-Houston. This is a man who embodies the greatness of Texas' Hispanic heritage, one who could show us the path to a far better state. If Rick can get the crucial backing he needs, I think he has a real chance to topple our reigning Ken Doll in November.
More about Rick, from his Web site:
Rick was raised in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Mt. Carmel High School in 1976 and attended Alvin Junior College on a Rusk athletic scholarship. It was during these formative years that he learned to work hard to get far in life.
In 1984, Rick completed his undergraduate education with the help of an ROTC scholarship at the University of Houston, receiving his commission in the United States Army. He went on to earn a Master's Degree in Public Administration in 1990 at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was an editor of the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy.
Rick felt compelled to answer the call and serve in the U.S. Army in the wake of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. He was an airborne school and service commander of the 143rd Infantry Detachment (Long-Range Surveillance), an aide to Brigadier General David Heuer, and aide-de-camp to General Samuel Turk, Adjutant General of the Texas Army National Guard.
But Rick's service in the Army did not end there. He became a Lieutenant Colonel in the Texas Army National Guard, and served as deputy garrison commander of the KMTC training facility in Kabul, Afghanistan after 9/11. Rick was deployed in Afghanistan for a total of 14 months until August 2005, and he was also the Laredo Border Sector Commander in Operation Jump Start during the summer of 2006.
Upon his return from Afghanistan, Rick was tapped by Mayor Bill White as Incident Commander of Houston's Hurricane Katrina relief efforts at the George R. Brown Convention Center. His leadership with the military, as well as his record in community service, was crucial as the GRB was transformed into a virtual city that cared for nearly 30,000 evacuees, and was then dismantled in the course of less than a month. At the center, Rick coordinated medical, employment, travel, housing and food services for more than 2,000 evacuees living on-site.
There's a lot more here. I don't think anybody is going to give this man any shit if he forgets to wear a flag lapel pin some Monday morning on the campaign trail. (But, looking at his resume, he's probably the sort of guy who will always remember to do that.)
Noriega represents a unique chance for a Democrat to win statewide office in Texas, for the first time since 1990. I hope he can get some out-of-state money; Cornyn has most of the Lone Star State high-rollers lined up. It's high damn time Texas had someone besides the usual plutocrats representing us in Washington.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
What Happened In Texas ...
By Manifesto Joe
... was that Hispanics turned out. A whole lot of them. And they voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton.
It appears that El Paso put her over. She won that urban area by a ratio of over 2-to-1. That, and her strength in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, offset a big Obama vote in Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston and Austin.
I feel kind of bittersweet about the whole thing. There are things I like and dislike about both, but I am very ready to support whichever one is the nominee.
It seems there was a strong Obama vote among those who cast ballots early, and among those who made up their minds early. The more undecided people, and those who waited until yesterday to vote, went mostly for Hillary. The experience argument seemed to carry a lot of weight with those who decided late.
So, if you're wondering, how did I vote? I voted Democratic, as an early voter. My wife waited until yesterday, and she also voted Democratic. That's as much as you're going to get out of me right now.
... was that Hispanics turned out. A whole lot of them. And they voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton.
It appears that El Paso put her over. She won that urban area by a ratio of over 2-to-1. That, and her strength in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, offset a big Obama vote in Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston and Austin.
I feel kind of bittersweet about the whole thing. There are things I like and dislike about both, but I am very ready to support whichever one is the nominee.
It seems there was a strong Obama vote among those who cast ballots early, and among those who made up their minds early. The more undecided people, and those who waited until yesterday to vote, went mostly for Hillary. The experience argument seemed to carry a lot of weight with those who decided late.
So, if you're wondering, how did I vote? I voted Democratic, as an early voter. My wife waited until yesterday, and she also voted Democratic. That's as much as you're going to get out of me right now.
You can get the exit-poll demographic breakdown here, at CNN.com.
Texas postscript: A second story is that perennial candidate Gene Kelly stands a chance to make a runoff for the Democratic U.S. senatorial nomination against state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston. This is one that probably won't be decided until much later today -- Noriega was hovering at around 50 percent of the vote, with Kelly a distant second.
Kelly has run for U.S. Senate three times, and actually got the Democratic nomination and the honor of getting clobbered in 2000 by GOP incumbent Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. He seldom campaigns. He's a retired military lawyer and judge, somewhere around 81 years old.
Observers have been trying to figure out how he's achieved this modest but noticeable level of success, and they figure it must be the name. "The dancer is dead," many party regulars are trying to tell the voters.
I can't help but think that if such a significant slice of the electorate is that stupid, then Rick Noriega's surname may not be helping him much.
Problem is, Kelly has actually done well enough to force the Texas Democratic Party into a couple of expensive runoffs. Keep your fingers crossed that he doesn't do it again. Here are a couple of links that tell more of the story: This one has the real info. This one is just for fun.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
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